If the difference between spot and contract prices is over...

If the difference between spot and contract prices is over $50,000 and we're producing 2,000 tonnes per year, I will volunteer for the job of putting my time into making the sales on the spot market for a trivial 10% fee. The other hundred million dollars or so can be kept by AGY.

I don't know how much time and money it can cost to sell the product, but if it's essentially dumping it into a spot market (as opposed to opening up a multimillion dollar supermarket to sell 50c apples) it can't be too large a percentage of the total sale price.

At over AU$100,000 per tonne, that's over $200,000,000 per year at 2,000TPA.

According to your analogy, the entire Chinese spot market is analogous to a market table where you can buy a single apple. If that's true, why is anyone using it as a benchmark for anything? I suppose this begs the question of how much volume is going through the Chinese spot market (I honestly have no idea).