Pending global shortage of Battery Raw materials, page-6

I don’t know if it’s been linked before but there was a lithium-relevant major AFR editorial published a few days back :
https://www.afr.
com/business/mining/how-china-will-rule-the-next-industrial-revolution-20190515-p51ngs

“How China will rule the next industrial revolution
Because few governments have articulated, let alone implemented, an explicit resource strategy, China is more than a decade ahead of the game.

Foreign Policy analytics team
May 17, 2019 — 12.00am
A fight between the United States and China is brewing over 5G and the question of who can be trusted to control the world’s wireless infrastructure. But scant attention is being paid to an issue of arguably greater importance to the future of the world’s economy and security: China’s control of the raw materials necessary to the digital economy.

No new phone, tablet, car, or satellite transferring your data at lightning speed can be made without certain minerals and metals that are buried in a surprisingly small number of countries, .....



Here are a few excerpts from https://www.outline.com/5rD2Ja version of the story :



‘.......FP Analytics has produced the first consolidated review of this unprecedented concentration of market power.

This analysis reveals how rapidly and effectively China has executed its national ambitions, with far-reaching implications for the rest of the world.

China’s 13th Five-Year Plan declared 2016 to 2020 a “decisive battle period”for the nonferrous metal industry and for building a well-off society. Its hallmark initiative, “Made in China 2025”, aims to build strategic industries in national defence, science, and technology.

To meet these objectives, in October 2016, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced an action plan for its metals industry to achieve world-power status.

By deploying state-owned enterprises and private firms to resource-rich hot spots around the globe, China would develop and secure other countries’ mineral reserves —including minerals in which China already holds a dominant position.......



...
......Despite China’s slowing growth and a big pullback in its foreign direct investment in other sectors, the government has maintained robust financial support for resource acquisition; mergers and acquisitions in metals and chemicals hit a record high in 2018.

Though it boasts a rich endowment of natural resources at home, China lacks significant reserves of three resources vital to its tech ambitions: cobalt, platinum-group metals, and lithium.

It has successfully employed two strategies to secure control of them. One is driven by China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which use development finance and infrastructure investment to embed themselves in higher-risk countries, establishing close ties with government leaders. The second is investment by state-linked private firms in market-based economies. Both strategies have shown agility and an ability to effectively adapt to local circumstances to achieve the same end.

...