Cobalt Blue Signs Cobalt Metal Offtake Term Sheet with STG to Advance Kwinana Refinery Commercialization

On October 15, Hithium announced in Tongliang, Chongqing that it had reached full production with 200 GWh of shipments. Around 2022, most battery enterprises were focused on power batteries and consumer batteries. That year, Hithium made a rather bold decision: to focus solely on energy storage, stay out of the power and consumer businesses, and make long duration energy storage (LDES) its main course. LDES typically refers to large-scale energy storage technologies with continuous discharge durations of more than four hours, serving as a supporting force for balancing the electricity supply and demand of fluctuating new energy sources such as wind power and PV, and for ensuring the safe and stable operation of the power grid. In 2023, Hithium launched its first-generation kiloampere-hour LDES battery cell. In 2025, Hithium introduced an 8-hour ESS and the world's first AIDC (artificial intelligence data center) energy storage solution. Wang Pengcheng disclosed that Hithium's LDES orders are currently booked through the end of 2027. The average duration of energy storage projects in Europe has already exceeded five hours, application scenarios of 11 hours have even emerged in Australia, and the duration of energy storage projects in the Chinese market is also lengthening. At the full-production ceremony, Hithium signed strategic supply chain cooperation agreements with Wanhua Chemical (Yantai) Battery Industry Co., Ltd., Hunan Yuneng New Energy Battery Material Co., Ltd., and Fujian Keda New Energy Technology Co., Ltd. The parties announced that they would hedge against the risk of cyclical supply fluctuations in the industry by establishing a long-term and stable cooperation mechanism. When discussing lithium price fluctuations, Wang Pengcheng said that in the long run, the cost of lithium carbonate will gradually move closer to industrial demand, and enterprises can control costs through multiple dimensions such as long-term agreements to lock in material systems, sodium-ion battery development, and the locking in of industrial ecosystem resources. Hithium firmly believes in the sodium-ion battery route and launched its second-generation sodium-ion battery just last month.

On October 19, Yinwang officially signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with CATL and Contemporary Energy Services. The three parties will carry out in-depth cooperation in two major directions: the three parties will achieve system-level integration across the vehicle end, station end, and cloud end, through deep integration between CATL's Choco battery swapping network and Huawei's Qiankun intelligent driving system; Yinwang officially joins CATL's Choco battery swapping ecosystem: Yinwang will work with strategic partners to expand the battery swapping and energy replenishment ecosystem by adapting and integrating cooperative car models with CATL's Choco battery swapping network.

In August 2026, China’s phosphate ore imports briefly appeared to be “recovering,” with imports of 116,000 mt and a MoM surge of 563.2%. One month later, however, September imports were knocked back to 22,000 mt, down 81.3% MoM and only slightly above July’s near-three-year low of 17,000 mt. August’s volume increase did not form a trend. It looked more like a pulse driven by a combination of the policy window and a low base, rather than a signal of substantive improvement on the demand side.