Aluminium demand driven by electric cars: Hulamin

Aluminium products manufacturer Hulamin has just reported their first half results with operating profit up 86 per cent in soft market conditions and a revenue increase of 25 per cent to R4.9 billion. Despite the oversupply situation in the market and local and export shipment being impacted badly, the company fared well in it revenue.

Richard Jacob, CEO of Hulamin gives the credit to good demand from their consumers coupled with good manufacturing performance.

He said that most of the profits were driven by their rolled products division. As extruded products can’t export and are much more subject to the demand in the local market, they form the smaller part of Hulamin’s business.

He said that the increasing demand for aluminium coming from the global automotive markets is one reason for such positive growth.  Especially, electric vehicles need lot of aluminium in the manufacturing process because of lightweighting.  Tesla has been their customer for a few years and is a brilliant platform for future development in the automotive rolled product division. They are in the lookout for more customers like Tesla and are planning to invest in order to expand their market further in North America.

Hulamin is studying the market demand for the automotive components that are made out of aluminium. The number of aluminium components in all electric vehicles is increasing and they aim to produce more of them. They are also of the view that it’s their export business for the automotive sector which is giving good support to their can stock sale and recycling business.

Save