While it was not named in the executive order, Beijing this week dismissed efforts by the US in a presidential decree to move supply chains for semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, batteries, critical minerals and strategic materials away from China.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said “artificial efforts to shift these chains and to decouple is not realistic,” urging Washington to “uphold the safety and reliability and stability of global supply chains.”
The Biden administration has acknowledged that making the US more self-sufficient would not be achieved overnight but the scale of the task may be underestimated.
In the battery supply chain for energy storage and electric vehicles, China’s command of the market is startling, and wresting it away is likely a decades-long process.
A new report by Roskill on the global cathode and precursor market out to 2030 lays bare how dependent developed markets, particularly Europe, are on China for mined material, precursors and cathode components.
The cathode market is dominated by NCM (nickel-cobalt-manganese) and NCA (nickel-cobalt-aluminum) chemistries and China controls 80% of the precursor market and the bulk of cathode production, according to the London-HQ research company.
Eileen Wu, consultant based in Roskill’s China office, says apart from signing long-term offtake agreements with producers to secure the supply of cobalt, manganese and nickel the trend of cathode and precursors companies integrating upstream operations has become more and more obvious.
More than 50% of nickel in the global precursor supply chain now comes from integrated operations. That figure is 30% for cobalt and more than 20% for Ni-Co – mostly from laterite ore in Indonesia (the subject of a WTO dispute), the Philippines and Papua New Guinea…
