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The leather and adhesive niches are price-sensitive and volume-limited, but ceramics and specialty paper offer better margins for purified grades. Producers should prioritize upgrading to low-iron, high-purity output to capture these segments, rather than competing on commodity-grade price alone.
The real bottleneck is not capacity but product differentiation. Export opportunities exist for high-alumina, low-iron grades, yet most Chinese plants lack the purification technology to compete with Western producers like Kemira or GEO. Consolidation and technical upgrading, not capacity expansion, are the prerequisites for margin recovery.