Page 6 - RusRPTAug24

6 I Companies & Markets bne August 2024
three-quarters of the country’s thermal power and also has wind and solar installations.
Besides power generation, the DTEK Group is involved in power distribution, coal, oil and gas extraction, renewables and trading. CEO Maxim Timchenko has been a vocal advocate of stronger energy cooperation with the EU and the transition to renewables.
Beyond the damage to DTEK’s physical assets, the company’s more than 50,000-strong workforce has paid a dear price during the war. Currently 5,000 DTEK workers are serving in the military, of whom more than 290 have been killed and nearly 900 wounded, with many others missing or held as prisoners. Four DTEK employees have died on the job and 68 others have been wounded in attacks on company facilities.
“It is not easy to keep morale high,” Sakharuk said. “During the last three months the majority of our plants were attacked three, four, sometimes five times. And after each attack, our employees tried as quickly as possible to bring units back online. They tried to use all their resources and will.” Without their persistence, the energy outlook for the next few months could be even more uncertain than it is today.
This article first appeared at Newsbase.com, a global energy publication that covers the major oil, gas, LNG, power and renewables developments from around the world on a daily basis. Contact sales@intellinews.com if you would like a free two-week trial to Newsbase.
Increasingly isolated by sanctions, Russia’s metal producers are being pushed into China’s arms
bne IntelliNews
Isolated by Western sanctions, Russian metals producers are increasingly turning to China, which has gone from being a primary competitor to a principal client.
The EU’s fourteenth sanctions package adopted in April included bans on imports of Russian aluminium, copper and nickel, all critical inputs for producing a wide range of goods from drinks cans to semiconductors and electric vehicles (EV).
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent sanctions, Russia has increasingly been forced to redirect its metal exports from Europe to China. Rusal, Russia's top aluminium producer, reported that its revenues from exports to China almost doubled in 2023 despite China's substantial domestic aluminium production and international competition. Nornickel, Russia’s leading producer of nickel and copper, saw its revenue from exports to China grow by 74.2%
in 2023, while revenue from exports to North America fell by 30%. Nornickel head sanctioned oligarch Vladimir Potanin said that China will soon account for over half of the company’s sales, Vita Spivak reported in a recent paper for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Like oil exports that were successfully redirected from Europe to Asia, Chinese customer data confirms a similar thing is now happening with metals. Russia’s share of Chinese copper imports rose from 1.8% in 2022 to 10.4% in 2023, making Beijing one of the top three importers of Russian copper. Russia accounted for 25.7% of China’s aluminium imports
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in 2023, up from 12% in 2021. Although Russia’s share of Chinese nickel imports was modest at 3% in 2023, this was a significant increase on just 0.56% in 2021.
Simultaneously, Russian metals producers have been integrating with Chinese value chains. In 2023, Rusal bought a 30% stake in Chinese alumina producer Hebei Wenfeng New Materials for $267mn. Rusal, heavily hit by the war in
“Although Russia’s share of Chinese nickel imports was modest at
3% in 2023, this was a significant increase on just 0.56% in 2021”
Ukraine, lost access to about 40% of its alumina supplies due to an Australian ban and the shutdown of its Ukrainian refinery in Mykolaiv, which was nationalised by Kyiv in 2023.
In April 2024, Potanin announced plans to relocate copper production to China by 2027 and form a local joint venture, though he did not specify partners. This likely aims to lever- age Chinese lithium-ion battery technologies, crucial after Nornickel's cooperation with German firm BASF fell through in 2022. Potanin commented: “It is better to be inside the