WHEN: Today, Monday, January 11th
WHERE: CNBC's "Closing Bell"
Following are excerpts from the unofficial transcript of a CNBC EXCLUSIVE interview with Alcoa CEO Klaus Kleinfeld on CNBC's "Closing Bell" (M-F, 3PM-5PM ET) today. Following is a link to the video on CNBC.com: http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000478732.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
KLEINFELD ON BUSINESS
If you look at the quarter, it's been really a solid quarter. We have substantially grown our aerospace business. Our customers have seen it and positively responded. And we've seen a string of large contracts overall in the last quarter. 4 billion of aerospace contracts. In the whole year 9 billion. Look at our midstream business. We are continuing to upgrade the profitability in there to go to a higher margin. Auto is one of those. We've increased our auto stocks. We've doubled the shipments compared to last year. This is good.
KLEINFELD ON PROFIT
We have seen a price decline over the course of the year in aluminum of almost 30 percent, in alumina of over 40 percent. We've basically did everything that's in our own control. We've reshaped the business and look where we are. We're still standing. We're still making a profit. So look at cash, look at productivity, all of this good. All that we have under our own control.
KLEINFELD ON ARCHITECTURE OF BUSINESS
We are taking all the actions into our hands. We changed the architecture of this business. We have five different businesses in there. We have alumina, we have an enviable position, by the way, in bauxite. We are building our bauxite business. We have a very strong position, first quarter position in alumina. We are improving our position on aluminum. We have an energy business in there and we have a casthouse business in there. All of these are businesses that can do very, very well. And also look at it like this. I mean today we're in a trough and we still are doing well in this trough. Look at the upside potential that this business has.
KLEINFELD ON SEPARATION
We will go through this once we go closer to into the first half of this year when we basically work through the structure and when we work through how we're going to arrange the balance sheet. So this is work that's still ahead of us. We're on track with a separation and as you can see through the numbers, all of this looks very positive in light also of the separation.
KLEINFELD ON ALUMINUM DEMAND
The aluminum side we're also putting out a new demand forecast for this year and we believe demand worldwide is going to increase in 2016 by six percent. This on top of the six and a half percent of last year, on top of the 9 percent the year before last. Aluminum is a very, very hot, hot metal. A lot of people want to have more of this. For us, it's most important that we focus on those things that we have under our own control. We're not dependent on China. I mean China has opportunities rather than threats for us.
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