Skip to main content

China is set to control 50% of Cobalt.

 

China map
China is set to tighten its grip on the global sup­ply of cobalt as the price of the metal used in elec­tric car bat­ter­ies hits a 32-month low off the back of a surge in pro­duc­tion.

Over the next two years, China’s share of cobalt pro­duc­tion is expec­ted to reach half of global out­put, up from 44 per cent at present, accord­ing to a report by Dar­ton Com­mod­it­ies, a UK-based cobalt trader.

China’s grow­ing role in cobalt sup­ply comes as a 12-month rally for the metal has spun into reverse, with prices drop­ping 60 per cent to $16 a pound from a peak above $40 a pound in May.

«A lot of things con­verged at the same time to push the mar­ket down the relax­a­tion of logist­ics issues, weak con­sumer elec­tronic sales and a tech­no­logy shift towards lower or no cobalt EV bat­ter­ies,» said Cas­par Rawles, chief data officer at Bench­mark Min­eral Intel­li­gence, a pri­cing agency.

The sup­ply surge was more than double the demand increase, lead­ing to the price col­lapse.

Soft sales of port­able elec­tron­ics glob­ally hit demand, Covid-19 lock­downs in China and a shift in the Chinese elec­tric vehicle mar­ket towards lower-range bat­ter­ies that do not use cobalt.

www.sba.tax

Labels:

Comments

  1. Mason13 March 2023 at 09:55

    Never a good thing when a powerful country (especially China) has such large control over such a valuable resource.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jayden M.13 March 2023 at 10:23

      Maybe we should invest in the other countries that are producing cobalt so they (perhaps) produce more?

      Delete
  2. Noah Mirren13 March 2023 at 11:06

    Whether it's China or Russia, this is not good. But let's make sure they don't go even higher than 50%. Like Jayden said, we should help the states that produce cobalt so they increase production and do it faster. Countries like: Australia, Canada, Philippines, Congo, Papua New Guinea.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Christopher13 March 2023 at 13:33

      From what I read, a lot of China's cobalt is coming from Congo. So maybe offer Congo more money so they export to countries like the UK or US? Could that work? Who knows.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Cloud Bookkeeping

HS2 cost cuts new routes and add delays.

 Trans­port depart­ment offi­cials have begun work on «Project Sil­ver­light» sug­gest­ing the high­speed rail scheme might face four addi­tional years of delay. The planned High Speed 2 rail line faces fur­ther delays of up to four years and more cuts to the project under plans being drawn up by min­is­ters to rein in its bal­loon­ing costs. The extra delays to the coun­try’s biggest infra­struc­ture project would mean that it would not be com­pleted until as late as 2045 — 12 years after ori­gin­ally planned. «This is a func­tion of infla­tion; we are hav­ing to find huge sav­ings because the cost of everything the depart­ment is already doing will have become so much more expens­ive by then,» said one gov­ern­ment offi­cial. In Octo­ber, the FT repor­ted that the Treas­ury had asked HS2’s man­age­ment team to identify poten­tial cuts or «scope reduc­tions» to the high-speed line. Trans­port depart­ment offi­cials have sub­sequently begun work on Project Sil­ver­light aimed at fi...
4 comments
Read more

Google has launched its Bard chat­bot.

  Google has launched its Bard chat­bot in a move to rival OpenAI’s pop­u­lar Chat­GPT, as it seeks to make up lost ground in the race to com­mer­cial­ise gen­er­at­ive arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence tech­no­logy. Google said that Bard, which provides answers to text­based ques­tions, will be run sep­ar­ately from its Google Search engine. In recent weeks, gen­er­at­ive AI has also been integ­rated into widely used pro­ductiv­ity applic­a­tions, such as Google’s Work­space includ­ing Google Docs and Gmail, and Microsoft’s Office 365 soft­ware, as well as into pop­u­lar apps such as Duolingo, allow­ing mil­lions of people to start inter­act­ing with the tech­no­logy. «We want to get feed­back and gradu­ally phase up the num­ber of people who have access to Bard, and the reason for that is we want to be able to test and learn from that before we roll it out very widely,» said Zoubin Ghahramani, vice-pres­id­ent of Google Research. Bard is built on top of Google’s AI tech­no­logy known a...
3 comments
Read more

Doubt on CS's collateral.

  Credit Suisse provided an emergency $140mn loan to Greensill Capital based partly on invoices to companies that deny ever doing the business stated on the documents. The Swiss bank provided the loan in October 2020, less than five months before the collapse of Greensill, a supply chain finance firm that counted former British prime minister David Cameron as a senior adviser. Invoices issued by metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Commodities and sold to Greensill formed part of the collateral for the loan, according to documents seen by the Financial Times and people familiar with the transaction. Yet several of the parties named on the invoices have told the FT they did no business with Liberty. GFG has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Credit Suisse’s loan had a clause dictating that the collateral value had to be equal to or greater than the $140mn borrowed. The terms of the debt agreement only allowed invoices on Green-sill’s balance sheet to count towards this tally if t...
2 comments
Read more