01 APRIL 2026AlCircle.com

April aluminium premiums on the rise: Market reacts to Gulf smelter hits

3 min read

So far into the week, aluminium premiums in Europe and Japan have appeared on the rising graph as a reaction to Iran’s drone and missile strikes on the Gulf smelters of Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA) and Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) on Saturday, intensifying the prevailing worry over aluminium supply tightness.

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Surges across regions and standardised benchmarks

In Europe, the duty-paid aluminium premium for April delivery has rallied a four-year high since June 2022 and settled at USD 594 per tonne, marking a 16 per cent rise since Friday.

In the same trend, April premium in Japan surged a staggering 20 per cent over the previous week, climbing from USD 250 per tonne to USD 300 per tonne. Compared to the premium records in Europe, this one marked an even greater all-time high, the record going back to September 2017.

Moreover, in the US, the Midwest premium for April, an added cost over LME aluminium prices for physical delivery, rose to USD 1.12 per lb or USD 2,469 per tonne on Monday, matching its previous record high. The upward trend was further spiked by the fact that EGA and Alba are two of the biggest suppliers to the US.

Concurrently, the three-month benchmark of the London Metal Exchange (LME) soared to settled at USD 3,585 per tonne on Tuesday, surpassing the record of the March 4 session which hit a four-year high since the COVID-19 phase in 2022, entering a new all-time high in the premium ledger.

Similarly, Goldman Sachs raised its LME aluminium price forecast from USD 3,200 to USD 3,450 per tonne for the second quarter of 2026.

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Pre-existing supply crunch aggravated

Close of March witnessed the April premium in Europe increase by a massive 57 per cent, further fuelled by the Iranian strikes on the EGA and Alba facilities. The hike in premiums came even before the start of the Middle East conflict. They were at continued one-year highs in the midst of an already volatile market that was disturbed by the smelter outage in Iceland, the closure of the Mozal plant in Mozambique and the EU's new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) tax on imported primary aluminium.

In his weekly LinkedIn newsletter, the London Metal Exchange trainer and risk management consultant, Jorge Eduardo Dyszel, mentioned, “The week of March 23–27 showed signs of stabilisation after the previous wave of aggressive liquidation.”

However, with the two leading Gulf smelters incapacitated for output in the near term, have once more sent the gradually recovering market tumbling into a new phase of panic, resulting in price revisions over an aggravated supply crisis.