Recently, 2023 performance reports for China's lithium battery industry chain have been released one after another, among them, upstream lithium mining companies are the most intensive. Against the background of declining lithium prices in 2023, the performance of China's upstream lithium mining companies has collectively declined compared to 2022. Among the seven downstream companies that have been announced, only Gotion and CATL recorded YoY growth, SMM has compiled the recently announced performance of the companies as follows:
In terms of the main business types of enterprises, the collective performance of upstream brine and lithium mining enterprises has all been suffered a serious year-on-year decline. Compared with the situation in 2022 when the lithium carbonate price reached a peak of nearly 600,000 yuan/ton, in 2023, the price kept going downwards. Although the upstream companies are still profitable, but their net profit growth rate is significantly lower than that in 2022.
On the contrary, when the price of raw material lithium carbonate fell, midstream and downstream companies significantly reduced their costs, and their YoY decline rate was relatively better than that of upstream companies. According to SMM historical prices, battery-grade lithium carbonate dropped from 512,000 yuan/ton at the end of 2022 to 96,900 yuan/ton at the end of 2023, a drop of as much as 81.07%.
Although the decline in lithium carbonate prices has led to a significant decline in the performance of upstream companies, however, the decline in raw material prices has reduced the cost pressure on battery companies to a certain extent.Taking the price of prismatic lithium iron phosphate batteries as an example, while the price of lithium carbonate has fallen, its price has also dropped by 54.08% compared to the end of 2022. Gotion, whose net profit is expected to increase by more than 157% this time, mentioned that with the further decline of the raw material, it's help for them to reduce the costs and increase efficiency.
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