The price of cobalt has fallen so far over the last couple of years that even Congo's artisanal miners have given up on the battery metal…They have been swept aside by a wave of production from the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) formal sector and a secondary flood of metal from Indonesia…Metals investor Cobalt Holdings is betting that the worst is over…The company is aiming to raise $230 million from an initial public offering in London the majority of which it will use to buy 6,000 tons of physical cobalt from Glencore…Chief Executive Jake Greenberg believes the purchase from Glencore, the first of several, will be "at or near a low point in the cycle", according to the company's registration filing…Greenberg helped launch Yellow Cake, which offers investors a physical uranium play…The DRC government's imposition of a four-month export ban in February is a positive sign that the world's largest cobalt producer has woken up to the fact it is producing too much…Cobalt has a history of boom-and-bust pricing as super-strong rallies such as those in 2018 and 2022 generated an artisanal supply response…Not this time…Rather, it was China's CMOC Group which caused the supply shock, more than doubling production to 114,000 tons, above both guidance and assumed nameplate capacity at its TFM and KFM mines in the DRC…But any decision "will inevitably imply a strict limitation of exports in whole or in part until market balance is reached with regard to the supply and demand of cobalt", according to Patrick Luabeya, head of the government's strategic metals authority…Congo's apparent readiness to address its over-production has dispelled some of the cobalt blues, boosting the price to $16 per pound from a 10-year low of $10…But if the world's largest producer is prepared to limit exports or production, the market may have found a price floor, an elusive concept for a metal that is largely produced as a by-product of either copper or nickel…The bull case for the metal rests on EV battery demand continuing to expand to the point that cobalt usage starts outstripping production some time around the turn of the decade…BMI expects market surpluses to shrink going forwards, even without any production curbs in the DRC, with a structural supply deficit emerging "from at least the early 2030s"…But cobalt's fortunes remain in significant part dependent on the global battle to produce ever more efficient and powerful batteries. Some of them will contain cobalt, others will not…Cobalt Holdings is not the only entity looking to scoop up cobalt at bargain-basement prices…China's state stockpiler has been doing the same. BMI estimates the National Development and Reform Commission received around 16,600 tons of cobalt in 2024, up from 7,200 tons in 2023…While China is well stocked, the West isn't, even though just about every country classifies cobalt as a strategically important metal, not just for its use in batteries but also in the form of super-alloys for aircraft manufacturing.

Indian auto production could grind to a halt within days due to Chinese export restrictions on rare earth magnets, according to company executives and documents from industry groups, which want the government to lobby Beijing to relax the curbs…China, which controls over 90% of global processing capacity for the magnets used for automobiles, clean energy and home appliances, enacted restrictions in April requiring companies to obtain import permits from Beijing…Though a response to U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs, the export curbs will impact automakers globally…While rare earth magnets are a crucial component in electric vehicle motors, they are also required for parts like power windows and audio speakers used in traditional cars…And though the measures imposed by Beijing are meant to focus on high-performance exports, shipments of low-end magnets are also being held up at ports due to confusion around implementing the restrictions…"Though the cost of imported rare earth magnets is miniscule in vehicles, risk is vehicles cannot be manufactured even if we are short of one component," SIAM and ACMA said in a separate document submitted to the Indian government.