Smelter Asia
Things are already starting to look tough for the Smelter Asia project even though it's four years before the scheduled opening of its aluminium smelting plant. The plant has a projected capacity of 500,000 tonnes which is much, much higher than the total demand for aluminium in Malaysia. The viability of the project must be highly dependant upon exports.

According to one of its government agencies, China currently has the capacity to produce over 5 million tonnes of aluminium annually. Plants in the "pipeline" will increase that to over 10 million tonnes per annum.

For its sake, I hope that Smelter Asia's cost of production is close to that of its Chinese competitors.

Contingency Galore?
Today's New Straits Times quoted the Deputy Transport Minister on progress on the double tracking project from Rawang to Ipoh. He said the project is 70 per cent complete, is on schedule, will be completed by December 2004 and operations will begin a year later.

If I've read that correctly that's 12 months between project completion and starting operations. That's a lot of contingency or is it?

Let's keep an eye on the project to see when operations start.