AVZ chart, page-6212

Lithium short term oversupply caused a market crash on lithium stocks.
I expect oversupply to be temporary, the worst is to last until around 2021.

If lithium sector were dead, why would Tianqi Lithium recently purchased a 23.8% stake in SQM for nearly $4.1 billion?

As long as Manono project is economically viable, Chinese will take it, Huayou, first mover advantage, others, you never know, have to wait until the chicken is hatched.


Here’s interesting part from Mr Moores.

Benchmark Mineral Intelligence returned to the US Senate on 5 February 2019 for a second hearing on the supply chain for electric vehicle batteries and energy storage.

Simon Moores, Benchmark Minerals’ Managing Director, had been summoned by the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and provided testimony on the supply chains of key battery raw materials used in energy storage.

In his testimony Moores explained to the committee how the global lithium ion megafactory trend will affect raw material demand and questioned the USA’s current role in the supply chains, offering a warning that it was being outflanked by China.

The full committee hearing can be viewed here.

The excerpt below is taken from Moores’ opening testimony to the committee.

“We are in the midst of a global battery arms race, in which so far the US is a bystander. The advent of electric vehicles and energy storage has sparked a wave of battery megafactories that are being built around the world.

“Since my last testimony only 14 months ago we have gone from 17 lithium ion battery megafactories to 70. In gigawatt hour-terms we have gone from 289 GWh to 1,549 GWh, that’s the equivalent of 22 million pure electric vehicles worth of battery capacity in the pipeline.

“The scale and speed of this growth is unprecedented and it will have a profound impact on the raw materials that fuel these battery plants. The scale of investment will also drive the cost of lithium ion battery production down below $100 kWh this year. This adds extra impetus to this mega-trend of battery megafactories and the impact on the demand for critical battery raw materials of lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite, has been unprecedented.

“For example, in the next decade the demand for lithium [used in the battery industry] is set to go up 9-times, cobalt is set to go up 6-times, nickel is set to go up 5 times, and graphite anode is set to go up 9 times.

https://www.benchmarkminerals.com/b...nate-us-a-bystander-in-battery-raw-materials/