China’s property woes following the liquidation of embattled developer Evergrande have raised concerns of slower demand for raw materials from the world’s leading metal producer and weigh on suppliers across the Asia-Pacific.
China accounts for more than half of the world’s minerals demand for metals production, and the property sector and infrastructure are two of the largest segments fuelling demand for products like steel, copper and aluminium.
Vietnam’s hopes of becoming a production hub to rival China are showing momentum. A big boost will come as the nation leans into its untapped reserves of rare earths, even as it struggles to find traction in new sectors such as electric vehicles.
Over the past decade, the country has built a beachhead in manufacturing, ranging from cars to electronics. Computers and accessories are now the largest export, surpassing textiles and footwear. The expansion of foreign assemblers like Foxconn Technology Group, GoerTek and Luxshare Precision Industry mean that Apple products like Macs and AirPods are made locally.
(Bloomberg) — Just 18 months ago, the world’s biggest mining company was in a nickel frenzy. BHP Group, to much fanfare, had struck a deal with Tesla Inc. to supply it with the crucial ingredient for electric vehicles. It was about to go toe-to-toe with Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest for control of one of the globe’s most prospective mines.
For BHP, nickel offered a bright spot. Its management had earmarked the material as a key pillar of growth, a future-facing commodity that would help offset its exit from fossil fuels and let it tap into new demand driven by the world’s race to decarbonize.
Five of the world’s major carmakers aren’t sufficiently mapping their supply chains to stamp out links to forced labor programs in China’s Xinjiang region, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
The area in China’s northwest is an important aluminum producer, accounting for about 9% of global supply, and the industry has ties to state-sponsored labor transfer programs that have been accused of coercing Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities into jobs, it said.
The collapse of lithium and nickel prices is a rude awakening for Australia’s miners, but also reveals the challenges in the Albanese government’s ambition for greater domestic manufacturing.
The West Australian government’s budget is still flush with mining royalties thanks to iron ore. But although iron ore will continue to sustain the state’s finances, last year’s excited rhetoric about Australia instantly becoming home to a rich new resources boom in critical minerals is now looking distinctly threadbare.
In early 2023, WA politicians were marvelling that lithium royalties had suddenly grown to be worth $1 billion a year, for example, albeit a distant second to iron ore. Then minister for state development and now premier Roger Cook boasted of WA’s ambitions in critical minerals processing, extending from lithium hydroxide to nickel sulphate to battery manufacturing.
Battery minerals specialist IGO will close its Cosmos nickel mine in Western Australia’s Goldfields region at the cost of about 400 jobs as cheap production from Indonesia wreaks havoc with Australian producers. IGO chief executive Ivan Vella said the ability of Indonesian nickel miners to cost-effectively build new mines and processing plants and bring them to full capacity had caught the market by surprise.
Vella, presenting his first results since joining IGO from Rio Tinto in December, said the recent nickel price plunge meant it would not be prudent to bring the new mine into full production.
Western capitals fear closure of unviable mines will increase China’s control of critical resource
Indonesia is flooding the global nickel market with low-cost supplies, forcing rivals to shut unprofitable mines and sowing panic in Washington and Paris that the upheaval will give China more control over the strategic resource.
The country, the world’s largest producer, expanded production by 30 per cent last year to 1.9mn tonnes even though global demand for the metal used in electric car batteries and stainless steel barely grew, according to investment bank Macquarie.
LAUNCESTON, Australia, Jan 29 (Reuters) – Iron ore is having a strong start to the year, with rising prices and robust imports by China, sparked by optimism the world’s largest buyer of the steel raw material is adding enough stimulus to boost demand.
The optimism in the past week has consigned China’s soft steel production data for December to memory, with both sentiment and fundamentals supporting the iron ore market. Iron ore contracts traded in Singapore ended at $135.31 a metric ton on Jan. 26, posting a weekly increase after declining for the two previous weeks.
The Thai life: A steady gem supply and a history of expertise continue to attract cutters and dealers to the Asian hub.
Thailand has long served as a center for colored gemstones. Its ruby and sapphire deposits and its strategic location — neighboring the gem-rich nations of Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia and Vietnam — have enabled the Thai gem industry to develop multigenerational knowledge and skills in mining, treatment, cutting, polishing and trading.
Political turmoil in Myanmar — starting with the Japanese invasion in 1942, and later a nationalization spree by the government — led to an influx of ruby merchants and miners from Myanmar to Thailand, further enriching the latter country’s gem industry. Among the arrivals was the family of fifth-generation gem merchant Santpal Sinchawla, managing director of Sant Enterprises.
(Bloomberg) — Magnitogorsk, in the Ural mountains, was developed as a symbol of Soviet industrial might and its capacity for economic modernization. Today, a new, 75 billion-ruble (roughly $840 million) coking plant in the steel town is being built by a Chinese engineering giant and hundreds of Chinese workers.
The contract between Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works PJSC, known as MMK, and state-owned Sinosteel Engineering & Technology Co. was signed before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and links between the two predate that. But since Chinese engineers and builders began arriving in large numbers to speed up construction last year, the project has been trumpeted by officials on both sides as emblematic of closer ties.
China’s interest and influence continue to grow in countries across Africa. Beijing buys political support and access to raw materials with major infrastructure investments.
For 34 years, the first foreign trip of the year has always taken the Chinese foreign minister to Africa. This week, Wang Yi visited Egypt, Tunisia, Togo and Ivory Coast before traveling on to South America. In addition to the crisis in the Middle East, his agenda included economic cooperation and civil society exchange.
Africa is playing an increasingly important role for China, which is hungry for energy and raw materials. After World War II, communist China cultivated intensive cooperation with African countries. Beijing fraternized and positioned itself as a spokesperson for these underdeveloped countries, which later would become part of what is now called the “Global South.”
When Indonesia launched its bid to corner the world’s nickel market and gain a stranglehold on electric vehicles, it overlooked one crucial detail. Battery technology is moving so fast that the world may not need the nickel after all. Indonesia is cutting down its rainforests and polluting the Coral Triangle for what looks increasingly like a commercial mirage.
Cheap and safe LFP batteries (lithium iron phosphate) are already so good that they have conquered 70pc of the EV mass market in China. They use neither nickel nor cobalt.
(Bloomberg) — China’s battery industry has seized on a glut in the global cobalt market to push through a change in the way the commodity is priced.
A rapid expansion of cobalt mining in Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia has output racing ahead of demand, dragging down global prices. It’s also prompted a push by squeezed Chinese refineries to win changes in how cobalt is bought and sold.
A new report accuses a massive China-funded nickel industrial complex in Indonesia’s Maluku province of causing “significant” environmental destruction and existential threats to indigenous peoples in the area, adding to the array of issues the nation faces in becoming a major player in the global electric vehicle (EV) supply chain.
Released on Wednesday by the US-based Climate Rights International (CRI) advocacy group, the report also alleges that the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park (IWIP) in Halmahera, Maluku, worked with Indonesian police to protect the interests of some nickel miners by engaging in “land grabbing, coercion and intimidation of indigenous peoples”.
LONDON, Jan 17 (Reuters) – Nickel was the worst performer among the London Metal Exchange’s (LME) base metals last year by some margin as the market priced in a wave of new Indonesian supply.
Indonesia’s mined production rose by 29.2% year on year in the first 10 months of 2023, according to the International Nickel Study Group. Nickel demand is rising fast thanks to its use in electric vehicle batteries but nowhere near the pace of supply growth.
