Although, technically, lithium is not a commodity, it's "behaving" like one, showing the classic boom-and-bust pattern: chinese spot lithium carbonate prices, as assessed by Fastmarkets have collapsed from a peak of $26.23 per kilogram in November 2017 to $10.93 last month.
Those companies that manage to advance their projects through the current "bust" phase will be swiftly rewarded in the next "boom" phase, when exponential demand growth exhaust the by then weakened supply.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/column-boom-bust-lithium-market-143015344.html COLUMN-Boom-and-bust lithium market needs a pricing rethink: Andy Home Albemarle Corp., the world's largest lithium producer, is not impressed by the London Metal Exchange's (LME) plans to launch a lithium contract.
"An exchange contract tends to support a commodity market, and that's not what we believe this (lithium market) is", David Ryan, the company's head of corporate strategy and investor relations, told an industry conference in Chile earlier this month.
(...) It and other established producers believe that lithium is a specialty chemicals market and should be priced on a contract-by-contract basis.
At a chemical composition level that may well be right, but in terms of pricing, lithium is conforming perfectly to the boom-and-bust pattern of a classic commodity market. The challenge for the lithium industry is how to live with such volatility.
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