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Alcoa faces a loss of up to $110 Million as the restart of Spain's aluminium smelter is delayed until mid-2026

Alcoa Corp announced on Monday that it anticipates a loss of up to $110,000,000 due to the delay in the restarting of its San Ciprian Aluminium Smelter in Spain.

The plant's production was halted in 2021 because of high electricity prices. The plant was in the process to be restarted, but this was delayed because Spain was hit with a nationwide blackout on the 28th of April. This disrupted the smelter as well as an adjacent refinery.

The smelter is operated by Alcoa in a joint venture with Ignis Equity Holdings since March.

Alcoa now expects a net loss between $90 and $110 million by 2025. This is tied to the smelter. This includes the pre-tax impact and non-controlling interests, translating into a loss between $0.35 and $0.42 per share.

The associated cash used for operations is expected to be between $110 and $130 millions.

The companies delayed their restart efforts until they received further assurances from Spain's government about the cause of outage and reliability of the national grid.

The company website states that the San Ciprian facility includes an alumina factory with a 1.5 million tonne capacity per year. This plant supplies Alcoa, other producers and external customers from non-metallurgical industries such as ceramics and chemicals. The primary aluminium smelter adjacent has a capacity of 228,000 tons per year. Reporting by Sherin Varghese, Bengaluru. Editing by Susan Fenton

(source: Reuters)