Higher international (& NAV) prices againReminder:
There are two companies that regularly quote domestic (in Chinese RMB) and international (USD including the 25% export tax, sometimes called FOB which is a transport term that all these things are paid, Free on Board)
The most relevant for us is Asianmetal that show daily changes here:
https://www.asianmetal.com/price/initPriceListEn.am?priceFlag=8&productInfoIMG=Ce+Oxide%E3%80%8299%EF%BC%85min+China%E3%80%82RMB%2FMT the reason this is the most relevant is because this is the one Dacha uses for valuing 85% of its metals. It is also updated daily.
The other one is Metalpages that is updated every Tuesday and Thursday and that has great articles about what is happening in the market. Both places require payments to access the full information.
Todays action in prices: Asianmetals reports few changes, the most important is a 12% rise (200 usd) in Ferrodysprosium (FOB) to 1885 USD compared to 1565 usd the last report. The rest + a few other Asianmetal FOB changes were already in my estimate yesterday of NAV up from 1.39 to 1.44. With this latest rise the estimate is now of a FOB NAV of 1.48 cad. (Not to be mixed up with the theoretical NAV using the domestical prices).
Some of you might follow the changes at Metalpages and note a small increase in domestic prices for dysprosium and a slightly lower price for terbium oxide.
Basically it is like this: Metalpages before today had domestic Dysprosium prices slightly lower than Asianmetals and alot higher for Tb oxide. With this change today these differences are still there, but less. The estimate of 1.85 - 2 cad for NAV based on the domestic prices is still valid as what logically should be our NAV in 1-4 weeks.
The huge change for today is however of course what seems to happen to Lynas in Malaysia (the separation plant that is supposed to produce metal/oxide from the Australian concentrate might face a delay of 1 year).
Can you imagine being responsible for buying rare earths at Toshiba, Sony or GE and running down your inventory when prices in China has gone up so fast, doing that knowing that you have a contract with Lynas, and hearing this?? I see a distinct possibility that the days of delayed FOB prices due to customers not buying much at higher prices, that this is coming to a very abrupt change. I would guess alot phone calls were made today "accepting that high quotation you sent us last week" Mr Wong. We are now happy to pay your price, how much can you sell us today??