> Over 85% of lithium is produced by just 2 international corporations
If I search google for this string, your post is the only one that comes up. How did you arrive at this figure?
In the history of industry, when has it ever been a positive indication that only two players control the majority of the supply?
Do these companies directly own the mines or are there partnerships and subsidiaries involved? What countries are they operating in? How long is the supply chain from the mine to the product?
How are water rights being managed? Is there correct oversight? Are any governments trading long term environmental damage for short term profits? What happens when the mines are depleted?
Albermarle - a Aussie company does about 1/3 of the worlds lithium mining.
SQM - a company out of Chile.
China - does the rest.
Each is responsible for ~ 1/3 of the worlds lithium production. Although SQM is on the downfall due to the referendum recently. And China is on the rise as companies like BYD are trying to really take over much of the larger lithium battery market, especially with EV cars but even laptops etc.
Most of this came from my own research for investment reasons.
Given this split at face value, then the inference that 85% of lithium is in compliance with international regulations is false. It would be at most 67%, and probably more like 33% in compliance actually.
Albemarle Corporation is an American specialty chemicals manufacturing company based in Charlotte, North Carolina. It operates 3 divisions: lithium (68.4% of 2022 revenues), bromine specialties (19.3% of 2022 revenues) and catalysts (12.3% of 2022 revenues).
It holds significant part ownership of Australian located Lithium mines (and mines in Chile):
> Talison Minerals Pty Ltd was a mining company based in Australia. It was split into Talison Lithium (as of 2020 a 51:49 jv between Tianqi Lithium and Albemarle Corporation)
and:
> Tianqi Lithium Corp is a Chinese mining and manufacturing company based in Sichuan.
Ero: mining of concentrates is carried on Australian (and Chilean) soil and subject to Australian mining regulations (some of the highest in the world ATM) with the refinment of concentrates being carried in Malaysia (high standards), Australia (high standards), some in China (various standards).
The point being that mineral resource ownership and regulation is a complicated layered business and your inference is sketchy at best.
If you're interested in learning more you can either study more on your own or subscribe to a mineral intelligence database, eg:
Well my comment is regarding who is doing the mining and more importantly where it’s being sourced.
Some have more regulations than others.
Chile has been looking to socialize its mining ops. So the international interests in their sources has waned a bit.
China does it cheaper but with far less concern about safety, environmental friendliness etc.
Overall these companies account for the lions share of raw lithium materials in the world. But what specific percentage and who is buying from who are totally different topics. For example why would a company like BYD look outside of China for lithium for its batteries?
BYD is a big supplier of batteries for companies like Dell, Lenovo and others. And they make car batteries for EVs in China and SE Asia.
Google has noticeably deteriorated in recent weeks. Does anyone have insight into that? Like more or too much gpt? The first link here is an article from 2021:
I see plenty of results from Google about this string, from multiple sources and multiple types (video, news and classic links). Unclear about that deterioration.
Right, but Google doesn't show everyone the same results. The earlier poster clearly didn't get a very good search result. If google search is bad for some people or in some cases, it should be a concern for everyone because you would never know when you are getting that poor result.
It basically does show everyone the same results. There's some session-based reranking and ads are heavily personalized, but there's basically no personalization in regular search.
Having been in some niche commodities sectors myself, Google doesn't always have relevant information and the producers are more interested in their competitive advantages that they’ll let people guess their way to completely inaccurate realities even at the expense of the industry.
It wouldn't surprise me if there are no sources that you respect.
If I search google for this string, your post is the only one that comes up. How did you arrive at this figure?
In the history of industry, when has it ever been a positive indication that only two players control the majority of the supply?
Do these companies directly own the mines or are there partnerships and subsidiaries involved? What countries are they operating in? How long is the supply chain from the mine to the product?
How are water rights being managed? Is there correct oversight? Are any governments trading long term environmental damage for short term profits? What happens when the mines are depleted?