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The cobalt powder market still showed no improvement this week, with both buyers and sellers lacking willingness to take the initiative and actual transactions remaining sluggish. Although producer offers still held in the range of 430,000-450,000 yuan/mt, the center of actual deals gradually shifted toward the low end, with some transactions dipping to 420,000-430,000 yuan/mt and high-priced material clearly lacking acceptance. Pressure in the trading segment increased, as low-priced offers appeared frequently and continuously pulled down market psychological price levels. Downstream, end-user orders at cemented carbide enterprises were weak, raw material consumption cycles lengthened, procurement was mainly limited to cargo pick-up under long-term contracts, and spot restocking was minimal. Weaker cobalt carbonate prices further weakened cost support. Overall market sentiment was bearish, and cobalt powder prices may continue to weaken and hit bottom in the short term.

This week, the cobalt sulphate market extended its weak trend, with psychological price levels between buyers and sellers continuing to diverge and transactions struggling to gain volume. Supply side, offers were clearly divergent: primary smelters had not yet fully digested earlier high-priced raw materials, and their offers remained around 80,000 yuan/mt, but with the MHP cobalt coefficient falling to around 80%, spot costs had already pulled back to 76,000-78,000 yuan/mt, and cost support had actually softened somewhat; recycling enterprises showed a stronger willingness to sell, with mainstream quotations at around 95% of the SMM low-end price, while some enterprises facing financial constraints continued to push down prices in exchange for liquidity, pushing low-priced resources in the market down to 70,000-72,000 yuan/mt, with a few isolated extreme deals heard at 68,000-70,000 yuan/mt, though still mainly sporadic spot orders. Demand side, conditions were weak, with downstream enterprises seeing only a slow recovery in orders, procurement limited to immediate needs, and some inquiry indications already pushed down to 68,000 yuan/mt, but the price spread between buyers and sellers remained wide, so actual concluded business was limited. In the short term, the cobalt sulphate market has yet to show clear signs of stopping the fall; price stabilisation still depends on a concentrated release of downstream restocking demand.

This week, the cobalt intermediate product market remained in a stalemate, with actual trading still in a vacuum. Recently, some miners launched tenders with indicative prices at around $21-22/lb, but amid continued weakness in cobalt salts and refined cobalt, downstream buyers and traders saw their psychological price levels pull back to around $17-19/lb, leaving a wide price spread between buyers and sellers; tenders continued to fail. Faced with the persistent stalemate, some miners have begun to consider changing their strategy, suspending direct sales of intermediate products and instead seeking toll manufacturers to process them into refined cobalt before selling, to avoid the risk of losses from direct sales at current low prices. In the short term, although miners are willing to hold prices firm, the lack of actual downstream purchasing support leaves the market locked in a stalemate, and price stabilization still awaits actual transactions to materialize.