Thai ADC12 aluminum scrap prices slip as the Q2 Middle East premium fades

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-07-14 — metals recycling Thailand

I watched the ADC12 quotes slip this week. Bangkok traders are now quoting 104.50 baht per kilo, down from 104.75 just days earlier.

The odd thing is the silence.

Deal volume has collapsed. Some traders I spoke to said they've seen near-zero transactions in the past fortnight. The price drop looks modest on paper, but what's really shifted is that buyers have largely stopped showing up. They're either sitting on stock or waiting for something cheaper.

ADC12 is the alloy everyone uses here—automotive parts, engine castings, electronics housings. It's the thing that keeps the die-casting workshops humming across the region. When it goes quiet, the workshops either have enough metal or they're hoping prices fall further. Usually both, to be honest.

Go back to April. There was actual momentum in this market. ADC12 rallied hard through May and June, driven partly by LME aluminum moving up but mostly by something more direct: Middle East supply got tight. The UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia—they're the heavy hitters when it comes to aluminum scrap feeding Asia. When you start seeing geopolitical risk around the Strait of Hormuz, freight costs jump, available stock tightens, and buyers start paying premiums just to secure anything. The math said this disruption could affect something like 3.5 million tonnes of global output. About 9% of world supply, or thereabouts.

That's the story that mattered then.

But geopolitical premiums are borrowed money. By late Q2 the Middle East logistics normalized—or at least normalized enough. The tightness bled out of the market. What's left underneath is the real demand picture, and it's not the sort of thing that drives prices up.

Actually, that's not quite right. The demand picture isn't weak, it's more like completely stuck. Thailand's automotive sector is sluggish. The die-casting shops aren't buying. Secondary smelters in Thailand and Malaysia are burning through stock, not restocking. Malaysia quoted 3,135 per tonne FOB this week but that number's not a floor, it's just inactivity masquerading as support. Real deals are somewhere in the 3,120 to 3,140 range, something like that.

No floor in sight.

The uncomfortable bit is that when you strip away the geopolitical noise, you're left with oversupply and no obvious buyer waiting in the wings to absorb it. SMM's analysis is blunt about this: no clear price support shows up in the short term. Trading becomes pure mechanics—supply, demand, what moves. When you're sitting in persistent oversupply with weak downstream consumption, smelters digesting inventory rather than building it, and the wider region softening, that's bearish, full stop.

India's scrap imports dropped 16% year-on-year in the first quarter. So this isn't just a Thai thing.

If you're in this market—recycler, trader, smelter—further price pressure looks more likely than recovery unless automotive demand picks up faster than the indicators suggest, which it doesn't seem to be doing. Another supply disruption would help, but that's not sitting on the horizon either. The 104.50 level isn't a floor. It's where the market paused.

Tags: ADC12, Thailand, Shanghai Metals Market, Thai ADC12 scrap price July 2026, Southeast Asia aluminum oversupply 2026, secondary aluminum alloy market outlook