The battle for "nickel" is coming! Tesla holding hands with the nickel giant Xinneng car is expected to become another pole of nickel demand.

July 23, today's sub-plate commodity metal nickel performance explosion, stocks have risen sharply, Qingdao medium range rose the limit, Hezhong science and technology rose 17.1%, China Metallurgical, Shengtun Mining both gained the limit.

Why is the non-ferrous nickel plate unique today when the three major indexes are collectively low, and the performance of lithium electricity and semiconductors is poor one after another?

This has something to do with the benefits brought by Tesla yesterday.

The demand for nickel also depends on Tesla.

Global mining giant BHP Billiton announced on the 22nd that Western Nickel, owned by BHP Billiton, will supply Tesla with nickel as a raw material for battery manufacturing, it has signed a nickel supply agreement with Tesla.

Tesla CEO Musk has said that nickel is a major concern for Tesla to expand the production of lithium batteries. BHP Billiton expects demand for nickel from battery makers to grow more than fivefold over the next decade, mainly to support the growing electric car market. According to Shanghai Nonferrous Network, the domestic demand for nickel for ternary precursors reached 96700 tons in the first half of this year, an increase of 153% over the same period last year.

Why do battery manufacturers need nickel?

Nickel is a very important alloy steel element. Because of its relatively low cost and higher density, high nickel battery was once regarded as the long-term development direction of new energy vehicle battery.

Huaan Securities believes that the increase of nickel content in ternary batteries can significantly enhance the energy density of battery products; at the same time, compared with cobalt, which is more volatile in price, nickel is widely distributed by ng and is easier to be mass-produced, so the cost advantage of high-nickel and low-cobalt batteries is highlighted. Ningde Times, LG New Energy and other domestic and foreign power battery enterprises continue to invest in the R & D and production of high-nickel ternary batteries. There is a broad market space for high nickel batteries in the future.

Wang Xin Securities pointed out that the market scale of ternary materials is expanding rapidly, while the direction of high nickelization further increases the demand for nickel, and the market for new energy vehicles is expected to become another pole of demand for nickel.

688005.sh expects global high nickel demand to reach about 125 and 3.6 million tons respectively in 2025 and 2030, accounting for 45 per cent and 57 per cent of cathode types, respectively, with an average annual compound growth rate of 39 per cent over the next 10 years.

Minsheng Securities Research News believes that the proportion of ternary high nickel in major new cars listed at home and abroad in 2021 is relatively high, including popular models such as Tesla Model Y/Cybertrunk, Volkswagen ID.4/ID.6, Nissan Ariya, etc., which is expected to lead to a further increase in the permeability of high nickel in ternary materials. The industry predicts that the permeability of high-nickel ternary materials will reach more than 60% and 70% by 2025.

NMC high nickel battery has a broad market in the future.

The battle for nickel among enterprises in the battery industry chain is becoming more and more fierce.

According to Battery China carding, from 2018, Ningde Times, LG and Tesla all began to lay out nickel and successively set up factories in Indonesia, a nickel-rich country.

After entering 2021, the war intensified.

Rongbai Science and Technology invested 2.9 billion yuan in February to launch the second phase of the "High Nickel cathode material production Line Project" built in cooperation with the people's Government of Zunyi City. after it is put into production, the high nickel production capacity may enter the door of 100000 tons / year. Two months later, the Rongbai Technology project started again in South Korea with an annual production capacity of 70,000 tons of high-nickel cathode.

In March, after a breakthrough in high nickel matte technology, Qingshan Holdings signed a supply agreement with Zhongwei and Huayou Cobalt. Qingshan Holdings will supply 60,000 tons of high matte nickel to Huayou Cobalt Industry and 40,000 tons of high matte nickel to Zhongwei Co., Ltd., starting from October 2021. In April, Zhongwei Co., Ltd. invested 600 million yuan to sign a joint venture agreement with RIGQUEZA of Singapore to smelt 30,000 tons of nickel-containing metal (Indonesia) with high annual output of nickel from laterite through a wholly-owned subsidiary.

In May, Yiwei LiNeng plans to set up a joint venture with Betteri and SKI with an annual production capacity of 50, 000 tons of high-nickel ternary cathode materials. A week later, Yiwei LiNeng signed the "Indonesia Huayu Nickel Cobalt laterite Nickel Mine Wet smelting Project Joint Venture Agreement" with Huayou Cobalt Holdings, Glaucous and LINDO. The parties will build a laterite nickel ore hydrometallurgy project in Indonesia with an annual output of 120000 tons of nickel and 15000 tons of cobalt, with a total investment of about 13.4 billion yuan.

The vast market space for high-nickel ternary lithium batteries has contributed to a substantial increase in the market demand for upstream nickel products such as nickel sulfate. According to the theme database of the Financial Associated Press, among the relevant listed companies:

The Rimu Nickel-Cobalt Project in Papua New Guinea, owned by China MCC, will produce 34000 tons of nickel and 2941 tons of cobalt in 2020; the high nickel project of Youshan Nickel Indonesia Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Shengtun Mining, has entered a stable operation period; Grimme is accelerating the Indonesian nickel resources project and is scheduled to start operation in early 2022.