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Aluminium, nickel, copper. “Made in Russia” metals produced from April 13th onwards will no longer be able to be delivered to Western stock exchanges, with a sanctioning measure agreed between the United States and Great Britain which has further inflamed the non-ferrous rally.
At the London Metal Exchange the impact was seen above all on aluminium, which opened the session on Monday 15th with a jump of 9.4%, the most sudden ever recorded in the history of the contract, which with its current characteristics has existed since 1987 There had not been such a rapid surge even in 2018, when the US had sanctioned the Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska, at the time the controlling shareholder of the giant Rusal: a move that had thrown the market into chaos, pushing Washington into a ready reverse.
For all metals, the rise diminished during the day, but aluminum – of which Moscow controls 5% of world supply – still continued to trade above the threshold of 2,600 dollars per ton, after having set a record for two years at $2,728.
Similar script for copper – which rose to the highest since 2022, with a peak of 9,640 dollars – and for nickel, which recorded peaks of rise close to 9%, rising up to 19,355 dollars (only to then fall back to around 17,800 dollars).
4% of the copper supply and 6% of the nickel supply come from Russia, but for the latter metal Moscow’s influence is actually much more relevant, since the Norilsk group – with a market share of more than 10% – is the world’s leading supplier of Category 1 refined nickel: the purest and most valuable quality, suitable for battery cathodes, as well as the only one deliverable to the LME.
Tags: Russian metals banned stock exchanges aluminum copper twoyear highs
