Citi Bank and Baring Asset Management visit Asian Metal

On the morning of November 8, vice president Jacky Shang and Ada Gao from Citi Bank, Maggie Sheng from Baring Asset Management (Asia) Limited, Dixon Lau from Harvest Global Investments, Howard Pang from Moore Capital Asia Limited and Charles Wu from Fidelity Management & Research (HongKong) Limited visited Asian Metal and conducted communications with Carol Lin, the cobalt and lithium market analyst and Friday Gao, the manager of base metal department.

Carol introduced the upstream and downstream market conditions for cobalt and lithium. The mainstream supply for cobalt raw materials is from Congo where the cobalt concentrate exports are restricted in order to make best use of cobalt resources and downstream plants also prefer to use cobalt hydrometallurgy intermediates to produce. As the demand from traditional downstream alloy and magnets markets tend to stabilize while demand form battery market increases, it is predicted that cobalt prices would rise further within coming 2 years. As the imports for Australian spodumene have increased and the lithium salts output in China are expected to increase gradually, the high level prices for lithium will decline slightly.