[SMM Weekly Review] This Week's Hydrometallurgy Recycling Market: LFP Black Mass Prices Continued to Rise (2025.10.27-2025.10.31)

SMM October 30 News:

This week, prices of salt products such as cobalt sulphate and nickel sulphate held steady, while the price of lithium carbonate began to rise continuously due to solid fundamentals including good demand. With the increase in lithium chemical prices, the lithium payables for ternary and LCO black mass rose slightly, but discount coefficients for nickel and cobalt remained stable. The price per % lithium for LFP black mass increased this week along with the rise in lithium chemical prices. Taking LFP pole piece black mass as an example, the current price is 2,900-3,100 yuan/mtu, up 150 yuan/mtu WoW. For ternary black mass, the nickel and cobalt payables for ternary pole piece black mass currently stand at 75.5-76%, flat WoW, while the lithium payables are in the range of 71-74%, up WoW. On the profit side, externally purchasing LFP black mass to produce lithium carbonate continued to incur losses, with profit margins between -5% and 6%. Except for several newly commissioned LFP battery hydrometallurgy recycling plants this year, most LFP recycling enterprises have production lines capable of producing lithium carbonate from other raw materials. Therefore, even as lithium carbonate prices improved, most companies chose to halt purchasing and production when faced with losses. The situation is similar in the ternary hydrometallurgy sector, where profits generally hover around 1-3%. In the LCO hydrometallurgy sector, as cobalt prices continued to rise, driving up cobalt payables for upstream and downstream recycling enterprises, profits have recently declined to around 1-3%. Supply side, after the price increases for nickel, cobalt, and lithium, upstream recycling enterprises quickly followed with price hikes for batteries and pole pieces, including LCO and LFP batteries, and black mass prices also increased to some extent. Most enterprises, facing losses, adopted a wait-and-see approach, with many LFP battery hydrometallurgy recycling plants maintaining toll processing for business clients.

SMM New Energy Research Team

Cong Wang 021-51666838

Rui Ma 021-51595780

Disheng Feng 021-51666714

Yanlin Lü 021-20707875

Zhicheng Zhou 021-51666711