The cobalt market is no stranger to boom and bust cycles but the current downturn is unprecedented and no-one is sure how long it’s going to last. London Metal Exchange (LME) cobalt has imploded from a high of $82,000 per metric ton in April 2022 to $21,550, the lowest level since the contract was launched in 2010.
Once again the market has been swamped by over-production in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world’s dominant source of the battery metal. But while it was an artisanal mining surge that caused the bust of 2018-2019, this time around it’s China’s giant CMOC Group.
The company more than doubled its output of cobalt last year, pumping nearly 60,000 tons of extra metal into a global market of just over 200,000 tons. It doesn’t help that cobalt’s bright new energy narrative is starting to unravel as the electric vehicle (EV) sector evolves.
For the rest of this article: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/another-cobalt-bust-this-time-its-different-andy-home-2025-02-06/