Lithium battery new energy is turbulent, lithium carbonate prices have plummeted, and some mica lithium extraction companies have stopped production to support prices!
[Copy link]
Share some lithium battery news I saw:
This spring, the domestic lithium battery new energy industry chain is experiencing severe turmoil.
On April 4, the price of domestic battery-grade lithium carbonate, which is an industry indicator, fell to 224,000 yuan/ton, down more than 60% from the high of 580,000 yuan/ton at the end of November last year.
On April 5, the head of a mica lithium extraction company in Yichun, Jiangxi Province revealed that facing the recent drop in lithium carbonate prices by nearly 10,000 yuan per ton per day, half of the four major mica lithium extraction companies in Yichun have chosen to suspend production.
"Some time ago, we were forced to stop production due to the central government's environmental protection crackdown," the person in charge said. "Now we are voluntarily stopping production in response to market conditions."
According to a research report by Guoxin Securities, there are currently four companies in Yichun that have mica lithium extraction technology and mature production lines and own lithium mica mines, namely:
1) Yongxing New Energy, a subsidiary of Yongxing Materials, has an existing production capacity of 10,000 tons and plans to produce 20,000 tons of lithium from mica;
2) Jiangte Electric, which has a lithium extraction capacity of 15,000 tons from mica;
3) Feiyu New Energy, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Jiuling Lithium, has a mica lithium extraction capacity of 20,000 tons;
4) Nanshi Lithium Battery, which has a lithium extraction capacity of 60,000 tons from mica.
In addition, Zhicun Lithium, founded in 2021, also has mica lithium extraction capacity in Yichun. According to sources, nearly half of the company's lithium carbonate production lines are currently shut down.
It is understood that in 2021, the lithium carbonate production in Yichun, Jiangxi Province was 81,000 tons, accounting for more than a quarter of the total lithium carbonate production in the country. As of July 2022, Yichun's lithium carbonate production capacity was 180,000 tons, and the national lithium carbonate production capacity was about 450,000 tons, accounting for 40% of the country's total.
The price of lithium carbonate at 250,000 yuan per ton is considered by the industry to be the break-even point for many Yichun mica lithium extraction companies.
According to some industry insiders, the grade (lithium oxide content) of Jiangxi lepidolite is relatively low, ranging from 0.4% to 0.6% at the highest to 0.2% to 0.3% at the lowest. It is generally lower than the grade of Sichuan spodumene (around 1.2% to 1.4% on average) and the grade of salt lakes in Tibet and Qinghai, making the cost of extracting lithium carbonate from it generally higher than that of spodumene and salt lakes.
Generally speaking, the smelting of lithium carbonate from lithium mica ore requires the process of desludging, ore dressing, and leaching to extract lithium. A domestic institution calculated that the desludging yield is 80%, and depending on the grade of the ore (if calculated at 0.2%-0.55%), the ore dressing yield is 60%-85%, the leaching yield is 74.29%-83.64%, and the total yield is between 35.66%-57%. The full cost of lithium carbonate is 70,000 yuan/ton to 330,000 yuan/ton.
The person in charge of the above-mentioned enterprise revealed that the current full cost of extracting lithium from mica of his company is about 300,000 yuan/ton. However, affected by the configuration of ore raw materials, the utilization rate of the company's ore dressing plant with a production capacity of 500,000 tons/year is currently only around 30%-40%.
The industry's depressed mood is spreading
In addition to the plummeting price of lithium carbonate, the prices of products in the lithium battery industry chain, such as lithium hexafluorophosphate, electrolytic cobalt, battery-grade nickel sulfate, and battery-grade manganese sulfate, have also shown an overall downward trend recently, and it is not just lithium carbonate companies that have stopped production.
At the end of March, Shangtai Technology, one of the top five companies in the domestic market share of lithium battery negative electrode materials, issued an "Announcement on the Suspension of Production at the Company's Lichengdao Base", stating that the company has decided to gradually suspend production at the Lichengdao Base starting from March 28, 2023.
The announcement shows that the Lichengdao base of Shangtai Technology was established in 2008. It is the company's earliest production base and the starting point and birthplace of entrepreneurship. According to the maximum production capacity of the graphitization process in 2022, the maximum production capacity of negative electrode materials in the Lichengdao base is about 1,152 tons/month.
Regarding the reasons for the suspension of production, Shangtai Technology stated that from the perspective of demand, since the beginning of 2023, the growth rate of new energy electric vehicles has slowed down, the power battery market has been affected by destocking, and lithium battery customers have not been active in scheduling production, resulting in a slowdown in or even weakness in demand growth in the entire negative electrode material market.
In addition, it is reported that Zhongxinhang, the third largest power battery company in China headquartered in Changzhou, has started personnel optimization due to reduced orders and declining production efficiency of the factory. "Before, the entire Changzhou base had a maximum of more than 10,000 people, but now there are only around 5,000 people." There are restrictions on employees' overtime hours, and many employees are required to work six days and rest one day, or even work five days and rest two days.
On March 30, Ganfeng Lithium, the leading lithium salt manufacturer in China, said in an investor survey that one of the reasons for the rapid decline in domestic lithium salt prices is the change in downstream demand, especially the fierce competition among automobile manufacturers (fuel vehicle price war, etc.). The second reason is that the market expected a large increase in supply, including lithium mica and lithium salt lakes, and there was an expectation of oversupply. As a result, the market began to wait and see as lithium salt prices fell, and demands such as energy storage were also waiting for lithium prices to continue to fall, resulting in destocking.
Ganfeng Lithium further "supported the price" when accepting investor surveys. The company said that the demand for electric vehicles in the terminal market is still there, and there are diversified demands including heavy trucks and energy storage. In addition, the current concentration of spodumene suppliers in Australia is relatively high, and it is expected that there will be limited room for ore prices to fall in the short term. Considering that the recent release of production capacity of other types of resources such as lithium mica and lithium salt lakes has not been very fast, there may not be much room for lithium salt prices to continue to fall.
Lithium battery new energy is turbulent, lithium carbonate prices have plummeted, and some mica lithium extraction companies have stopped production to support prices! What do you think about this?
| 
提升卡
变色卡
千斤顶
京公网安备 11010802033920号
