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The government of the West African country is currently holding internal discussions, sources said, and will then be expected to ask mining companies to comply with reduced export quotas, sources told Fastmarkets.
Bauxite prices have plunged by about 50% since January 2025 when Guinean supplies started saturating the market, pushing up the inventories held by key consumer, China.
Fastmarkets’ weekly price assessment for bauxite, cif China was $59-62 per dmt on March 6, edging up from $59-60 per dmt on February 27.
The weekly assessment for bauxite, fob Guinea was $32-34 per dmt on Friday, down from $34-38 per tonne a week earlier.
Fastmarkets’ daily alumina index, fob Australia, was $303.25 on March 6, having retreated from $462.30 per tonne a year earlier
Guinea’s government has long wanted to exert some form of control over bauxite prices and no doubt thinks it’s timely to intervene to stop bauxite prices plunging further, Fastmarkets understands.
Intervening to limit the flow of the raw materials onto the market is also seen as a step toward ultimately encouraging investment in local refining capacity, which is seen as a step toward building smelting capacity in Guinea, sources said.
Guinean mining companies that have raised bauxite output above the production plans outlined in their license applications or permits will probably be asked to curb export volumes to levels outlined in their mining plans, the sources added.
Some companies have more than doubled output while some have quadrupled production – all well above production plans stipulated in their mining licences, according to sources.
The government could consider curbing production at the mine sites, Fastmarkets understands, but sources said the most-feasible option would be to force companies to throttle back on the volumes they export in line with volumes stipulated in their mining licences.
Guinea exported almost 183 million tonnes of bauxite in 2025, a 25% jump in shipments from 2024 as its top producers including SMB Guinea, CBG, Chalco and AGB2A ramped up volumes.
The West African nation, which accounts for more than 70% of global bauxite supplies, overtook Australia as the world’s biggest bauxite producer in 2023. Australia exported around 45 million tonnes of bauxite in 2025.
Mining volumes were expected to pick up this year when some miners that had been forced to suspend activities due to regulatory challenges, resumed production.
Nimba Mining Company, which became Guinea’s first state-owned miner after it acquired mining rights from Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA), has said it plans to ramp up output to 10 million tonnes this year and could probably aim for a long-term target of 14 million tonnes by 2027.
Nimba resumed production in December.
SD Mining and GIC Mining, whose licenses were revoked by the Guinean government in May 2025, also restarted production toward the end of 2025 after resolving their challenges with state authorities.
While the Guinean government wants to see bauxite prices above $100 per dmt, and could use export curbs to achieve that aim, it is also worried that it’s not the only bauxite producer in the world, one source said.
Indonesia has had a ban on exports of bauxite since 2023 in a bid to force producers to refine the raw material locally.
But a bauxite price below $60 per dmt for shipments to China is becoming “challenging,” particularly for producers without access to rail infrastructure that have to rely on trucks to haul the raw materials to the ports, the source added.
If Guinea curbs exports to around 150 million tonnes annually, that could help jolt the market and boost prices, Fastmarkets analyst Andy Farida said.
But until Guinea miners actually cut production, export curbs alone may fail to trigger a positive price reaction, Farida added.
Other producers such as Australia or Brazil could also step in and fill the void from Guinea’s cuts, the analyst said.
“If they manage to cut [exports to 150 million tonnes], the market will get spooked and that will create some sort of tightness,” Farida said. “Right now, Guinea is running out of time, so it has to do something.”
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) slapped miners with a cobalt export ban in February last year resulting in cobalt hydroxide prices surging 354% to the highest since 2022. The DRC government then replaced the ban with export quotas in October last year.
But adopting the same approach to bauxite production in Guinea could end up hurting government revenues if the companies suffer losses, making it an unviable option, a trader told Fastmarkets.
Another source said that Guinea’s Dynamic Mining and Ashapura have already begun to voluntarily cut production as one way to survive the price downturn.
Dynamic Mining, which had initially targeted more than doubling output to about 7 million tonnes this year, decided to cut production ahead of government finalizing its discussions, a source told Fastmarkets.
Ashapura had not respond to Fastmarkets’ questions by the time of publication.
Guinea’s higher-cost producers are likely to feel more pressure as energy and freight costs spike because of the conflict in the Middle East, the source said.
The rumors of a bauxite production quota policy in Guinea have circulated for some time, though no policy has been implemented to date, a Shanghai-based alumina trader said.
However, given the oversupply in the bauxite market, the fundamental conditions are unlikely to shift significantly, the trader added.
But an aluminium producer in Shanghai said the Guinean government wanted to follow Indonesia’s example.
“With the presidential election over and the domestic situation relatively stable, the introduction of a quota policy is highly likely,” the producer said.
Last year Guinea cemented its position as the top supplier of bauxite to China after exports jumped by 35% to about 149 million tonnes, China’s General Administration of Customs data shows, with the country’s bauxite imports rising by 26% in 2025 to a historic high of 201.2 million tonnes.
Joseph Flynn in London contributed to this article.
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