A coup in Guinea adds fuel to aluminium’s red-hot rally

FEW MIGHT have guessed that Guinea, a west African country of 13m people, played a big role in global commodity markets. In recent years the country has ramped up its production of bauxite, a dirty-red ore that is processed to make aluminium, thanks to hefty investment from China. In 2020 Guinea produced around 90m tonnes of the stuff, about a quarter of the global total, up from 21m in 2015. It now supplies more than half the bauxite used in Chinese refineries. And those refineries, in turn, produce more than half the world’s aluminium.Small wonder then that the military coup that threw Guinea into turmoil on September 5th was felt in commodity markets. Events in the country helped push the price of aluminium, already on a tear, to its highest level in ten years. (Guinea is also home to Simandou, one of the world’s richest untapped deposits of iron ore. Share prices in China Hongqiao and Rio Tinto, two investors in Simandou, briefly dipped when news of the coup broke.)