2012 all over again
About three years ago, we ran the cartoon below on this blog. This was the first cartoon created by our resident cartoonist Alex, who has since done several more for us.
Back three years ago, RoW aluminium companies were blaming the Chinese for their own woes. If only China would stop building new capacity, the foreign companies might have a hope of selling their excess capacity into China. It was a time when my friend Jorge famously predicted that China would be a net importer of aluminium by 2015, to the tune of up to 5 million tonnes.
Of course, none of that happened, and the foreign aluminium companies have no hope of selling anything to China. But the story is almost the same. If China would stop building capacity, supply would no longer grossly exceed demand, and China wouldn’t be the next exporter it is today.
But China is running to its own agenda, that’s clear, and perhaps if I was going to ask Alex to change this cartoon in any way, I would have the Chinese workers carrying on working, ignoring the foreign producers.
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