Novelis restarted the hot mill at its Oswego, NY plant on June 10, ending a nine-month outage at the plant that supplies more than half of North America's automotive body sheet.
By the numbers: Two fires in 2025 idled a mill that rolls 1.7 billion pounds of aluminum a year. Novelis expects the shutdown to cost it about $1.7 billion in cash, with North America shipments down 19% and segment EBITDA down 51% while the mill was dark, per its 8-K.
Ford called the outage a $2 billion headwind and lost about 100,000 units of production, while GM said it did not expect a significant impact.
The qualification wall: The lesson for any single-sourced input is how little spare capacity mattered.
CRU estimated that two rival mills each had more than 75% of the lost tonnage available, but alloy qualification and customer approvals stand between an automaker and a new mill, a gap CRU said "cannot be erased overnight." Novelis instead pulled sheet from its overseas plants, imports that ran straight into the 50% Section 232 tariff on aluminum.
Ford expected to carry "tariffs and premium freight" until the mill came back online, CFO Sherry House said on the company's fourth-quarter call.
What's next: Novelis has guided a return to positive free cash flow by March 2027, and its $5 billion mill in Bay Minette, AL will give North American auto sheet a second hub when it commissions later this year.
Until then, every body-panel program in the region still runs through one restarted mill in upstate New York.
