...why do you think Ganfeng Lithium has gone downstream to produce EV lithium batteries now? Produce cheaply to use it for yourself so the lithium batteries can be cheaply produced. No effect on the spot market.
...with more and more Chinese lithium producers getting into vertical integration, they can produce as much SC6 as they want, flood the market with their excess production, they won't need to worry about spot market pricing.
...that places Australian lithium miners in jeopardy over time (think twice about keeping those lithium stocks for your kids, seriously) if they cannot compete by reducing their production costs. With high cost of everything in Australia, not a chance unfortunately. We have minimum wages, unions, high taxes; they don't have those in Africa and South America.
At prices below RMB 60k/t, only vertically integrated spodumene projects & vertically integrated brine projects will be viable. That would be terrible for Australian (non-vertically integrated spodumene) & Chinese (vertically integrated lepidolite) producers.
