The rising trend of aluminum prices is gaining momentum again! Guinea, the largest producer of bauxite, is about to tighten its exports. The aluminum supply chain is facing a "time for supply reassessment".

Guinea, the largest producer of bauxite in Africa and even in the world, plans to announce major reform measures next month to control the export volume of this mineral used to manufacture aluminum, in an attempt to further boost the trading price of this industrial metal. The benchmark international aluminum price, LME (London Metal Exchange), has already risen above $3600 per ton, with the LME spot settlement price on May 14 reaching as high as $3768 per ton, an increase of nearly 50% since the second half of 2025. Wall Street financial giant Citigroup has even declared that the aluminum price is experiencing the "strongest bullish trend in over 50 years." It is important to note that Guinea's export control plan is not an isolated event in the African continent. Recently, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zimbabwe have implemented export restrictions on cobalt and lithium respectively, sparking a wave of "resource sovereignty" among resource-rich African countries the trend of controlling key mineral exports to seek higher pricing power and local added value is rapidly spreading across Africa. Statistics show that Guinea accounts for over one-third of global bauxite production, with its bauxite shipment volume skyrocketing by a quarter to 183 million tons in 2025, followed by further accelerated growth in the first three months of this year. Bouna Sylla, the Minister of Mines and Geology in this West African country, mentioned that this surge in supply led to a decline in the market, with prices dropping by nearly half from their peak at the beginning of last year. Sylla stated in a media interview, "Supply should not exceed demand. We hope to adjust the quantity to bring the price back to a reasonable level." Bauxite is the raw material used to produce alumina, which is then further processed into aluminum, an essential industrial metal for the global economy. Most of Guinea's bauxite production is exported to China. The Guinean government is expected to finalize this export control policy that was proposed several months ago in June. Sylla added that mining investors are very "interested in seeing prices rise." Guinea's mining control measures have been preceded by examples from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zimbabwe restricting the exports of cobalt and lithium. These minerals are primarily shipped to the electric vehicle/energy storage battery industries, which play a significant role in Asian markets. Like these countries, Guinea is also aiming to attract investments in local processing plants to extract more value from its natural resource endowment. It is understood that Guinea is vigorously promoting the construction of refining plants capable of producing alumina, with three facilities currently in the planning or construction stages to complement the country's only existing large-scale manufacturing plant. Sylla mentioned that the government is planning to add a total of five refining plants with a combined annual production capacity of about 7.2 million tons of alumina. However, this capacity can only process less than 15% of the bauxite mined in Guinea last year. Sylla stated that Guinea also plans to find major investors for an aluminum smelter. He mentioned, "For us, moving from alumina to aluminum is inevitable." From a 50-year high in aluminum prices to export controls in Guinea, the global aluminum supply chain is experiencing an unprecedented "supply reassessment" moment. The long-term bullish logic in the aluminum market appears to be evolving from a "single smelting supply impact" to a comprehensive supply reevaluation across the aluminum ore alumina aluminum value chain. Financial giant Citigroup believes that aluminum, an industrial metal, is currently in one of the strongest bullish trends in over 50 years, with the potential to reach $4000 within the next three months and possibly $5350 under a bullish scenario by 2027. According to the Citigroup analysts, the core basis of the rare bullish trend in aluminum prices is not sudden demand surges, but systematic weakening of supply elasticity: geopolitical conflicts damaging aluminum smelting capacity in the Middle East, constraints on electrolytic aluminum production capacity in China, limited available idle capacity overseas, and inventories at multi-year lows. Guinea's export control can be seen as an additional catalyst to the long-term bullish narrative in aluminum prices. Guinea is the world's largest producer of bauxite, accounting for over one-third of global production; with a 25% increase in bauxite shipment volume to 183 million tons in 2025, the bauxite price dropped nearly in half from its peak at the beginning of last year. Hence, the government plans to finalize export control policies in June to restrict supply and raise prices. From the perspective of the value chain, Guinea's control of bauxite exports will alter the "cost floor" and supply outlook of the aluminum industry chain. Bauxite is the raw material for alumina, which then enters aluminum electrolysis; if Guinea tightens its exports, the first affected will be Chinese alumina plants and the midstream processing system dependent on imported ore, subsequently transmitting through alumina prices, smelting costs, and raw material security premiums to aluminum smelting. As most of Guinea's bauxite is shipped to the Asian market, which is the largest aluminum consumer and processing center globally, this policy undoubtedly has a global pricing spillover effect. Citigroup and JPMorgan's bullish outlook on aluminum prices is rooted in the combination of "low inventory + low elasticity + high policy demand" in the aluminum market. In traditional cycles, high prices stimulate supply, suppress demand, and lead to self-repair; however, with China capping production capacity, slow recovery of Middle Eastern production capacity losses, sanctions, tariffs, and supply chain reconfiguration affecting Europe and the US, strong demand driven by green energy grid, renewable energy, electric vehicles, AI data center power infrastructure, etc., has a strong policy rigidity. In other words, the current rise in aluminum prices is not just macro speculation, but a non-linear reevaluation of the physical market as the buffer thinning. Bank of America proclaims major commodities to reign in the coming years Additionally, a research report released by a team led by Michael Hartnett, the chief strategist at Bank of America titled "Wall Street's Most Accurate Strategist" has indicated that in the coming years, investors will continue to flock to the commodity trading market; even as a new round of Middle Eastern wars temporarily comes to a close, the uptrend in the global commodity market is expected to continue for several years until the end of 2030. According to the team led by Hartnett at Bank of America, commodities represent the most logical, highest-level post-war trading theme with a clear hierarchy, and they predict that commodities will outpace stocks to become the biggest winners in the next few years; the core reason is that investors urgently need to hedge against risks, inflation, and a weaker dollar, while geopolitical conflicts and the global AI race ultimately reinforce the contest for energy, rare earths, minerals, and the essential resources of key commodities. He even summarized the core logic as: whoever controls chips, rare earths, minerals, and efficient energy resources, wins in this global AI war. This implies that, according to Bank of America, in the post-war world, the core of pricing isn't just interest rates and profits, but the security of the commodity supply system, control rights of the supply chain, and expansion of fiscal expenditures. With resource-exporting giant Indonesia considering establishing a new agency to tighten commodity exports, and the prices of industrial metals such as copper, aluminum, nickel continuously rising this year mainly due to the surge in demand for critical metals and minerals consumed by the construction of artificial intelligence data centers under the AI wave, commodities are clearly becoming the "AI core investment trend" beyond the AI power infrastructure chain covering AI GPUs/ASICs, data center CPUs, HBM/NAND/HDD storage, 2.5D/3D advanced packaging, liquid-cooled cooling systems, optical interconnect supply chains, data center power chains, etc. This shift is not just about buying models, chips, and high-performance AI cloud computing servers but investing heavily in the underlying energy, industrial metals, chemicals, and resource security premiums that support AI computing power infrastructure capacity expansion.