Quoting media sources, the Chilean judicial department recently announced that the Chilean court suspended two lithium production contracts recently awarded by the government on the grounds that "the bidding process is suspicious", one of which was proved to belong to BYD Chile.
According to public information, as the world's largest lithium ore reserve country and the second largest producer of lithium ore, Chile has proven lithium ore resource reserves of 53 million tons, accounting for 41% of the global total. In contrast, the proven lithium reserves on the mainland account for about 7% of the world's total reserves, and about 90% of them are salt lake brine water resources.
Due to the influence of many factors such as the quality of salt lake resources, mining conditions, production environment and purification technology, the main way of obtaining lithium raw materials in mainland China still depends on overseas lithium ore, accounting for more than 70% of imports.
As we all know, in recent years, under the background of the vigorous development of the new energy automobile industry, the scale of the power battery industry has also expanded. As the world's largest power battery supply chain market, compared with 2019-2020, China's power battery production, sales and installed capacity in 2021 showed a higher increase - production reached 219.7GWh, sales reached 186.0GWh, installed capacity reached 154.5GWh, of which pure electric passenger cars as the main demand accounted for 78.7% of the total installed capacity.
Obviously, this will put forward a higher demand for its power battery raw materials represented by lithium. The research report of Gaogong Lithium Battery describes the lithium iron phosphate battery - "60kWh lithium iron phosphate battery, a car needs 30kg of lithium carbonate", "100,000 tons of battery-level lithium carbonate, all to do lithium iron phosphate batteries corresponding to 200GWh".
At present, the price of lithium battery industry chain products is still rising. Taking lithium metal as an example, the relevant media disclosed that on January 18, lithium metal was quoted at 1.715-1.815 million yuan / ton, with an average price of 1.765 million yuan, up 80,000 yuan from yesterday. According to the data released on January 12, the highest price of lithium metal at that time was 1.54 million yuan / ton, and the price increased by 20,000 yuan.
"(Prices) are soaring," industry insiders point out. It is reported that the cumulative increase in lithium prices in the past year has exceeded 400%, and the price of power batteries has also been driven by the price increase of raw materials, an increase of about 5-10%, and has brought higher cost pressure to power battery manufacturers and car companies. It is worth mentioning that Australian lithium miner Allkem also said in recent days that lithium battery prices are expected to continue to grow by about 80% this year.
In fact, in the face of supply chain pressure, power battery manufacturers represented by the Ningde era have long been prepared. As a power battery manufacturer with a market share of more than half of the domestic market, since the beginning of last year, CATL has continued to make large-scale investment in related industrial chains.
As early as April last year, CATL disclosed an investment of no more than 19 billion yuan for the upstream and downstream high-quality industrial chain; in August, it announced that it intends to raise 58.2 billion yuan for five lithium-ion battery projects with a total investment of 69.253 billion yuan and research and development and supplementary working capital. In addition, CATL has also invested in the overseas lithium mining industry several times in the form of acquisition or equity participation, and there are also layouts such as the Yichun new lithium battery production and manufacturing base project with an investment of 13.5 billion yuan in China.
It is undeniable that in the context of rising prices of lithium materials, the domestic power battery industry chain will be impacted. It is worth noting that based on the current situation of high dependence on imported lithium, performance such as the obstruction of overseas lithium ore industry may exacerbate the dilemma of the above industrial chain.