Originally posted by ljcamp
Exceptional post
@regal
Thank you very much for posting. You are clearly very well educated and connected to the industry.
"A small volume of non contract spodumene out of spec was sold for $620/t on spot, the customer bought because they were desperate for supply. The banks jumped on claiming all spodumene was to fall. The tracked contract price for known australian spodumene in 2019 are above $700/t.China asked
ALB for lower price carbonate, the chinese lost a supplier. Alb sold outside of china at a higher price. They got the sparrow."
China has been screwing the market. They want cheap product, but got greedy. Oversupply theory resembles the tactics used by the shorts. China keep pushing the spot price lower hoping to lock in supply at low prices and shorts keep shorting as they have no way out.
Gonna go bang.
The industry needs to move quicker to diversify upstream processes outside of China, the Chinese are simply nasty operators. One only needs to look back to the late naughties when they screwed over Aussie IO miners and abandoned long term contracts, when RIO kicked up a stink they jailed RIO execs.