Del Monte Foods closing two more U.S. plants, laying off hundreds

I know nothing about the metals market, so will trust you. However price of everything from air conditioners to zippers is going up supposedly due to the price of metals.

Aluminum has been down for months and months it did rise this past week about $100 per metric ton. I work at an aluminum smelter, the way we make our money is to produce stuff that gets premiums on top of the LME price. China go around the LME by exporting thru a couple of terminals a supposedly finished product sold it cheap and their partners here melted it down and recast it back to Sow, Pig or Slab and then resold it on the market. Flooding our markets with cheap inferior metal. Now I cannot say about steel prices. I do know China has created a new market for us. China now produces enough of its own scrap aluminum that they have stopped importing scrap from the U.S. So scrap prices are down and we have a remelt furnace so we are buying up scrap from our customers, cut off ends etc., melting them down and recasting. Sometimes these very large corporations are just too big to adapt quickly to changing markets. They have the financial power to survive easier than smaller companies, but their survival strategy is to cut production and jobs. In our business, people's salaries and benefits are about 20% of our cost, raw material and power are about 70%. 10% other. So cutting jobs really doesn't help us.

I can add this, according to the market steel prices have been down for 2019, and actually dropped this week, so not sure why Delmonte and this article are blaming steel prices. Demand according to the site has been down for steel in the U.S. driving down prices even more??????