“I believe China will continue to invest but not necessarily increase its overall production”- Antti Koulumies, Vice President, Aluminium Business Line, Outotec

Outotec provides industry benchmark technologies and life-cycle services for their customers in metals and mining, industrial water treatment, alternative energy, and chemical sector, helping them improve their profitability in a sustainable way. Outotec possesses over a century of experience in developing technologies at its in-house R&D centers. Antti Koulumies, Vice President, Aluminium Business Line, Outotec gives an insight into the company's upcoming projects and new technologies in the aluminium sector for 2020 in the below interview: 

AlCircle: As a technology provider for the metal and mining sector how has been the year 2019 for you and what are you expecting in 2020?

Antti Koulumies: The aluminium market saw a lot of turmoil during 2019 and due to the uncertainty, we saw decision making for new projects being quite slow. Therefore our team was busy delivering on existing projects, like the successful finalization of the ALBA Line 6 Rodshop, helping customers with smaller brownfield modernizations and equipment replacements, focusing on our research and development with some exciting work done on digitalization and robotics, as well as active sales work for opportunities that are still cooking so to say.