According to the News Agency of Russia's Satellite News Agency on January 16, in order to reduce its dependence on Chinese graphite manufacturers, Tesla is actively seeking to purchase graphite from other channels. According to techXplore, last month Tesla has signed a formal cooperation agreement with Australia's Syrah Resources, which controls one of the world's largest graphite producers in Mozambique. After the new agreement lands, Tesla will obtain graphite from Mozambique to produce electric vehicle batteries, significantly reducing its dependence on Chinese-made graphite.
It is reported that with tesla and Australian companies signed a cooperation agreement, it also marks that in the electric vehicle industry, a new way of cooperation will appear. That is, the cooperation between electric vehicle manufacturers directly and the energy extractors needed to produce lithium-ion batteries skips the middle battery manufacturers. It should be noted that Tesla itself does not have the ability to manufacture high-end lithium batteries needed by automobiles, and still needs to cooperate with lithium battery leading enterprises such as Ningde Times. But for Tesla, independently deciding on the source of graphite needed to produce batteries helps to improve the stability of the company's basic resources.
According to the details of the relevant agreement between Tesla and Australian companies, Tesla will purchase 8,000 tons of graphite per year from Syrah Resources' processing plant in the United States starting in 2025. From this detail, Tesla's move is actually to sign the graphite order back to the United States, Mozambique, as an important country in southeast Africa, does not have the ability to process graphite, these graphite in Mozambique after mining, will be pulled to the United States domestic processing plant for processing. From the perspective of the profit composition of the entire graphite mining and processing industry chain, the enterprises that process in the United States are obviously more profitable.
Considering the importance of graphite to lithium battery companies, some insiders have given an evaluation of the direct cooperation of this multinational battery manufacturer. Simon Moores, an industry veteran of benchmark Mineral Intelligence in the United Kingdom who has long been engaged in providing battery material data and information, said that the cooperation between Tesla and Australian companies actually stems from geopolitical factors, and the United States wants to build related industries at home in order to have enough capacity to directly produce lithium electronics for automobiles in the United States.
In fact, Tesla made this decision to avoid too much pressure from the White House. The essence of this agreement is to push Tesla to reduce its dependence on Chinese-made graphite, and the new bill recently proposed by two US senators requiring US arms contractors to suspend the purchase of rare earths from China, both of which are the same purpose, that is, to minimize dependence on China and reduce the volume of transactions in terms of important basic industrial resources. On the one hand, this approach of the United States is to avoid the possible suspension of the sale of these strategic basic resources by China, which will attack the relevant industries in the United States.
On the other hand, the sales performance generated by U.S. companies will benefit the United States more. From Tesla's point of view, this agreement can also help Tesla cancel some of the pressure caused by frequent cooperation with China. Combined with the current new energy market, China has become Tesla's most important market in the world. Tesla sells a total of 450,000 cars a year in the Chinese market, 100,000 more than in the U.S. market.