Sept 10 (Reuters) – The steep premium paid for aluminum in the U.S. will not drop significantly even if Washington halves the tariffs on \u200cmetal from neighboring Canada, because imports from other countries will still \u200cbe needed, Alcoa’s finance chief said on Thursday. <\/p>\n
The price U.S. consumers pay on top of the \u200bLondon Metal Exchange benchmark for physical aluminum, known as the Midwest premium, is high at $1.09 per lb, or $2,403 per metric ton, but has eased from a record $1.19 in June on hopes the 50% import tariff could be halved for Canadian material. <\/p>\n
Speaking at \u200cthe Jefferies Global Industrials \u2060Conference in New York, Alcoa Chief Financial Officer Molly Beerman noted that the U.S. needed to import around 4 million tons \u2060of aluminum per year and Canada could only supply 3 million tons of that. <\/p>\n
“With the U.S. still needing to incent the import of a million tons, even if we \u200bwere to \u200bhave a favorable rate with Canada, we \u200bdon’t see Midwest dropping significantly,” \u200cBeerman said. “It might come off a little bit, but we wouldn’t see it returning to pre-tariff levels.” <\/p>\n
If there is tariff relief or waivers for other trade partners — such as Japan, South Korea or Europe — and the last 1 million tons is covered, “then you can expect the Midwest premium to reduce in response to \u200cessentially wipe out the tariff benefit,” Beerman said. <\/p>\n
Pittsburgh-based \u200bAlcoa produces around 900,000 tons per year of \u200baluminum in Canada and is \u200bpaying more than $1 billion in tariffs to bring most of \u200cit into the U.S., Beerman said. “However, the \u200bMidwest is fully \u200bcompensating us for that, as well as returning as margin because of the tightness in tons.” <\/p>\n
With aluminum supplies from the war-hit Middle East constrained, \u200bcustomers in North America and \u200cEurope are “actively looking for our supply,” Beerman said, noting that Alcoa’s \u200border book was “almost completely sold out for the rest of 2026.” <\/p>\n
(Reporting \u200bby Tom Daly; Editing by David Gregorio) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sept 10 (Reuters) – The steep premium paid for aluminum in the U.S. will not drop significantly even…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":843962,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[16290,26357,28,103,101,4794,357258],"class_list":["post-843961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-alcoa","tag-aluminum","tag-business","tag-canada","tag-economy","tag-london-metal-exchange","tag-molly-beerman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=843961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/843962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=843961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=843961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=843961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}