Compare performance of Piedmont PLL and Argosy, page-69

It's not Joe Biden The US EV sales numbers are still small compared to the EU and China, although the Democrat plan to support EVs will help change that over there.

What happened is that that prior to the 2018 lithium peak, everything was being fuelled largely by Chinese subsidies where China managed to produce the insane 420,000 EV buses it has today (in 2018, they had like 98% of the world's EV buses). A bus battery is often more than 3 Teslas, so back then, this was a big spike in demand. EV automobile sales were much smaller but climbing at 50-100% per year in China on subsidy. Chasing this demand, a lot of new miners rushed to build mines, Greenbushes promising to expand along with brine operators like SQM and ALB.

By 2018, PLS, AJM, A40 and others come online with lots of spodumene, however the bus building stopped as the Chinese actually cut subsidies resulting in no automobile EV growth in China for the entire year. Not to mention that China lacked the conversion capacity to even cope with all the new hardrock coming out of Australia. Hello oversupply! Two years of price decline later, A40, AJM and a few others failing, expansions globally shelved and no capital going into the sector,... all resulted in a cut to supply growth.

So that's two years of demand growth to catch up and get a head start. Today, we finally have real EV growth not held up entirely by subsidies anymore. Importantly, the big automakers finally have good selling models try to compete with Tesla. Li battery cost keep coming down to parity with regular internal combustion autos and everyone is going bananas with green regulations. This, IMO, is going to last some time as miners play catch up (100% growth rates are hard to supply).