Eric Desaulniers: Yeah. It’s a very interesting year. Why, because we saw the price going down since 2012 slowly with the refractories that are very weak. The steelmaking industry is not very good in the last few years, but starting in September the spherical graphite started to go up, but the flake graphite wasn’t going up until December. It went up significantly in December, but now there’s something special that is happening. The Chinese removed their export tax. Why did they do that? Their mine was dying because labor costs were going high, pollution is high so the government is bringing in some new tax for these mines, pollution tax. Everyone is waiting to see what will be that pollution tax on the Chinese. This year is very interesting because suddenly you have all the Chinese trying to go out of China again because, not of the export tax, but they need to reinvest in their operation to make it cleaner because it will be taxed soon on this. What the graphite price will do it’s difficult to say. At the same time the demand for lithium-ion batteries is draining a lot of the supply. There’s not so much new mines coming up into production so I see 2017 as being very important to keep going the uptrend. That’s where people will realize there’s not so much graphite into production. It’s very important for the lithium-ion battery. A little bit like lithium last year. Lithium is very sensitive to the lithium-ion battery market because, I think it’s 75% of the market is graphite. For the lithium-ion battery is now 25% of the whole graphite market so it’s less sensitive to this market…to access the full interview, click here
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