SMM metal.com - China aluminum spot and futures

One assessment, one country's entire physical market behind it. Shanghai Metals Market (SMM) is the Chinese price reporting agency whose A00 aluminum ingot assessment carries product code SMM-AL-AL-001, quotes on an in-warehouse Shanghai/Wuxi, VAT-included yuan-per-tonne basis, and functions as the benchmark domestic price signal for the world's largest aluminum producer and consumer. The published panel pairs that spot assessment with its daily high, low and change columns, with SHFE futures for aluminum (contract al2610) and alumina (ao2610), and with registered warehouse stock on both the Shanghai Futures Exchange and the London Metal Exchange.

The methodology matters as much as the numbers. SMM describes a systematic price evaluation built on actual transactions collected from producers, traders, consumers and distributors, with outlier screening applied before publication, and states it was the first price reporting agency in China to align its assessments with the IOSCO Principles under independent audit. That provenance is why procurement desks treat this series as the reference for RMB-denominated physical contracts rather than a derived conversion of Western benchmarks.

In Datadory's catalog of 1,744 datasets across 159 viable industries, this record scores 6/10 for quality and is one of 13 cataloged aluminum datasets — the China-domestic corner of that set, where every other series in the industry reads the market through Western exchanges and this one reads it at the warehouse door.

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Captured during the August 2026 review, reproduced as delivered:

SERIES   SMM A00 Aluminum Ingot          code SMM-AL-AL-001
Date     Avg.               Change     
2026-08-21   3,513.04 USD/tonne   +14.52

FUTURES  SHFE al2610                     23,710   +80 (+0.34%)
         SHFE alumina ao2610              2,698   +31

STOCK    SHFE aluminum inventory        422,097 t   -13,642 (-3.13%)
         LME aluminum inventory         246,925 t   0 (0.00%)

Three things worth noticing. First, the spot line arrives as one average with a change column rather than a raw trade print — it is an assessed price by construction, which is exactly what makes it usable inside contract escalators. Second, the two inventory lines move independently: in the reviewed snapshot SHFE stock fell 13,642 tonnes in one reading while LME stock did not move at all, so a single combined "exchange stocks" figure would have thrown away real signal. Third, futures quotes arrive in native CNY while the flagship spot assessment displays in converted USD — keep both bases labeled or your spreadsheets will quietly mix them.

Seven fields carry the core panel, all definitions verified against live pages during the August 2026 review:

• Date — the assessment date, rendered DD/MM/YYYY on the spot table (21/08/2026).
• Avg. — the number everyone actually wants: the day's assessed average for A00 aluminum ingot, native yuan per tonne, displayed in converted USD.
• High and Low — the upper and lower bounds of the day's assessment range, so intra-day dispersion arrives precomputed instead of reconstructed.
• Change — movement versus the previous assessment.
• Unit — the quotation basis traveling with each row: USD/tonne displayed, yuan/tonne underlying, in-warehouse Shanghai/Wuxi, VAT included.
• SHFE/LME inventory — registered warehouse stock on each exchange, the physical overhang line every China watch model wants.

Beyond these seven sit panels the public interface renders but does not document field-by-field: the intraday time/range/average charts on the detail page, historical depth behind the commercial archive, and extended product metadata. Those ship under additional fields on request — name what you need when you request the sample and they are scoped to your use case before delivery.

• Geography: China's domestic market, with the spot assessment struck on an in-warehouse Shanghai/Wuxi basis — the delivery points where most Chinese physical business clears — plus SHFE and LME exchange references alongside.
• Temporal: current-day assessments with intraday panels during the trading session on the public face; multi-year history exists behind the publisher's commercial archive and is deliverable as a continuous series once scoped.
• Granularity: one formal spot assessment per trading day, refreshed intraday during the session, with futures tick data on top.

That granularity profile is unusual among the datasets Datadory catalogs: of 1,744 records, only 395 update daily and 197 carry realtime cadence, and almost none combine a PRA-assessed physical benchmark with exchange inventory counts in one schema.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Request the sample first: nominate dates and we send the real rows shown above plus whatever additional fields you scoped. Ongoing delivery then lands on the cadence your desk needs — pushed to storage, served over an endpoint, or synced straight into your database.

A China-domestic benchmark earns its keep in four specific jobs:

• Procurement and hedging desks — pricing physical supply contracts against the actual RMB reference buyers and sellers settle on, instead of converting an LME quote and absorbing the basis error. The High/Low pair on each row also shows how wide the day's negotiation band ran.
• Investors and quants — modeling China-specific supply signals off the SHFE inventory line, where the reviewed snapshot showed a 3.13% single-session drawdown while LME stock sat flat. Domestic draws that never register offshore are precisely the early moves.
• Competitive intelligence and product teams — tracking input-cost pressure in yuan terms for any China-manufactured aluminum-intensive product, from extrusions to EV battery enclosures.
• Market researchers and consultants — citing an IOSCO-aligned assessed price with named methodology in reports about the Chinese market, rather than leaning on a converted Western benchmark and footnoting the difference away.

Pair, do not substitute. The IndexMundi monthly series and Trading Economics' commodity page both track the global market through LME-linked quotes in USD per tonne; ScrapMonster covers the secondary side grade by grade; USGS chapters cover production fundamentals. None of them tell you what a tonne of ingot actually changed hands for inside China on Tuesday. SMM does — same day, local currency, VAT included, warehouse basis named.

The spread between the two worlds is itself a tradeable, reportable quantity. Import-parity models, export window analysis and double-counting checks all start with a domestic assessment beside an international one. Datadory delivers both sides of that pairing within the same aluminum industry catalog, so the join happens once instead of being reassembled from three vendor portals.

Methodology note — the displayed value is a USD conversion of a yuan-per-tonne assessment. Confirm which basis any delivered series preserves before wiring arithmetic; mixing bases mid-history is the single most common integration error with this record.

Provenance note — published by Shanghai Metals Market (SMM), the Chinese price reporting agency behind the SMM A00 assessment. SMM states it was the first price reporting agency in China to align its assessments with the IOSCO Principles under independent audit, building assessments from actual transactions across producers, traders, consumers and distributors with outlier screening.

Completeness note — the August 2026 review captured the full visible panel: the A00 spot line, both SHFE futures contracts, and both exchange inventory lines, with no blank cells. The exact publication time of the daily assessment is not stated on the pages reviewed, and historical depth is confirmed per series when scoped.

Where to go next — the International Aluminium Institute statistics cover global production and shipments for supply-side context, the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries aluminum chapter covers reserves and trade flows, and the Hugging Face global aluminum price daily dataset offers a free-tier daily companion for backtesting against.