99.95% High Purity Manganese, page-830

Well that was a stronger uplift in Mn prices on the 30th Dec update than I was expecting to see. There hasn't been a circa 8-9% weekly increase since the runup in Feb/Mar 2022. Rocket's post on a different thread noted some production issues/pricing increases for S32 so that assists to understand the increase.

So where does that put prices. The mini-spike at the end of 2021 took the price to US$5.60 and is currently aligned to 0% in the Fastmarkets graph. This US$5.60 point can be confirmed in OHM's Dec21 quarterly. Reading from the graph, prices are down about 8.5% which would put the current price at about US$5.12/dmtu (and E25 then loses shipping costs and grade discounts).

The AUD/USD exchange rate is helping a bit also. It was around 0.72 when the price was mainly about $5.46/t for a couple of months late 2021/early 2022 or around A$7.58 and with the current exchange rate of 0.6815, the price is about A$7.51. Exchange rate movements mean the price to Australian producers is almost the same as January 2022 (with a big yoyo in between).