Odisha's AL renaissance: Angul Aluminium Park sets the stage for a global manufacturing hub
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Update time : 2025-09-29 14:01:18
Odisha today sits at the commanding heights of India’s aluminium industry, contributing nearly 72 per cent of the country’s primary metal output. Yet this dominance has long carried a paradox. The state has remained a smelter powerhouse without building the deep downstream ecosystem that converts hot metal into high-value products such as extrusions, rolled sheets, foils and castings. That imbalance is what the government and National Aluminium Company (NALCO) now seek to correct through the Angul Aluminium Park. If the project achieves its ambition, Odisha could transform from being merely the backbone of India’s upstream aluminium supply into a centre of value-added excellence with global competitiveness.
The logic for such a pivot is that global aluminium dynamics show the real growth and margins increasingly lie downstream. Primary aluminium production reached 72.05 million tonnes in 2024 and is projected to rise to 107.07 million tonnes by 2033 at a CAGR of 4.1 per cent, according to IMARC. Yet raw volume growth is not the prize; it is the share of semi-finished and value-added products that now drives the sector’s economics. Global aluminium consumption by form reveals the split: extrusions account for about 34 per cent, foil and rolled products another 32 per cent, castings 23 per cent and wire rods 8 per cent, as highlighted in AL Circle’s 2025 downstream outlook. Europe’s experience underlines the point. The EU depends on imports of primary ingots to feed its downstream factories, with more than half of its needs met from abroad in 2020, but its industrial power lies in the margins captured by its rolling mills and speciality fabricators.
