RE:Andy Home - Reuters May 25 Typical hyped-up (although probably accurate) reporting.
The surge in China's imports of class 1 Ni starting in 2015 was due to Indonesia banning exports of raw Ni ore that China was smelting into NPI for use in SS production, and should be considered an outlier.
In the years that followed, Chinese companies were forced to build NPI smelters in Indonesia, and as that capacity gradually went into operation, Chinese SS producers' demand for class 1 Ni slowly dropped back down as they switched to that Indonesian supply of NPI. The import spike in ~2021 was due to a new ban of ore exports by Indonesia this time try to convince SS producers to build plants there and capture even more of the value-add chain (don;t think they had much success on that one).
The proper baseline import numbers are those of the pre-ban period, and apart from the very recent slump, are pretty much in-line with that baseline.