[SMM Analysis] Costs Continued to Rise This Week, Anode Price Increase Trend Became More Evident

SMM February 20 News:

This week, most anode material prices showed varying degrees of increase. Cost side, apart from being affected by tax policy, petroleum coke prices continued to rise due to the recent shutdowns for maintenance at multiple petroleum coke plants and the significantly increased demand for low-sulphur petroleum coke from anodes. Similarly affected by tax policy, needle coke, another anode raw material, remained in a low-price range, leading to a continued price increase this week. The integrated development of anodes is ongoing, and the oversupply in the outsourced graphitisation market remains difficult to change. However, as graphitisation prices are close to the cost line, they remained stable this week. Demand side, while the market recovery has shown some signs, the pace is relatively slow, and the demand increase is not significant. In summary, under the backdrop of high theoretical costs, anode material manufacturers exhibited a strong willingness to raise prices. However, constrained by price suppression from battery cell manufacturers, the price increase of anode materials was limited this week. It is expected that the price increase of anode materials may expand further in the future.

SMM New Energy Research Team

Cong Wang 021-51666838

Xiaodan Yu 021-20707870

Rui Ma 021-51595780

Disheng Feng 021-51666714

Yujun Liu 021-20707895

Yanlin Lü 021-20707875

Zhicheng Zhou 021-51666711

Haohan Zhang 021-51666752

Zihan Wang 021-51666914

Xiaoxuan Ren 021-20707866

Jie Wang 021-51595902

Yang Xu 021-51666760

Mengqi Xu 021-20707868