Cobalt hydroxide has a $5/lb gap between bid and offer, and nothing is crossing it

Benchmark has observed no cobalt hydroxide trades over the past 10 days, leading to the daily price assessments to hold steady at $22.00–$23.00/lb. However, Benchmark has noted a widening spread between bids and offers, which are reported between $17.00–$22.00/lb in Benchmark’s weekly cobalt price assessment.

Benchmark's daily CIF Asia cobalt hydroxide assessment only accounts for confirmed transactions rather than indications, sentiment, or levels at which somebody says they would be willing to deal, which means it tracks evidenced trades and nothing else. That design choice is usually invisible to the user, because in a functioning market the distance between a trade and a well-informed indication is small, but in a week like this one it becomes the whole picture.

Put those two series side-by-side and the market becomes legible, because the sell-side remains anchored to the level where material last actually changed hands while the buy-side has marked itself down five dollars, or roughly 23% below it. Nothing has traded across that gap, so the bid has not been validated by a single transaction and the offer has not been tested by a single buyer willing to lift it.

What sellers are actually saying

Sellers have told Benchmark that they will not transact below $20.00/lb and that they generally need something above $22.00/lb to conclude a sale, which is consistent with the last evidenced trades and also five dollars clear of the bid.

“Both sides are behaving rationally, since DRC material sitting in Asian warehouses carries a cost but does not carry a deadline, and buyers holding adequate inventory against a weak downstream order book have no reason to chase,” said George Ingall, a senior cobalt price analyst at Benchmark. “What that produces is a market which has stopped clearing rather than one which has repriced, and while the repricing may still come it has not come yet, which is the distinction that matters.”

Why a flat trade-based price assessment is information

The temptation with a daily assessment that has not moved is to read it as stability, however that is the wrong reading here as the daily series only moves on confirmed trades.

Across Q3 the daily assessment has changed on just six of forty publication days, against twenty-seven of sixty-four in the same quarter last year, so trade-driven repricing had been thinning for months before it stopped entirely last week.

“This is where methodology earns its keep and where the differences between price reporting agencies stop being academic,” said Daniel Fletcher-Manuel, Benchmark’s director of indexing and derivatives. “An assessment that recognises only evidenced spot transactions will go quiet when spot transactions stop, and that silence is a signal and a truthful one. An assessment that widens its range by sweeping in small, marginal, intra-Chinese sales between related or affiliated parties will keep printing a lively-looking spread through the same week, even though those sales are not spot in any commercially meaningful sense and much of that volume would be more honestly described as transfer pricing. A range built on that material tells a buyer with a Q4 offtake to settle almost nothing about where third-party units could actually be bought, which is why a wider spread is often not more information but less.”

Taking the European metal low of $25.00/lb as the payable reference, the last evidenced hydroxide trades imply payables of around 88 to 92% while the current bid implies about 68%, leaving twenty payable points on the same specification unresolved with no transaction anywhere in between.

China is discovering price, just not in hydroxide

Sulphate is moving, and it is instructive that it is, with prices falling 6.7% w-o-w to RMB 68,000–72,000/tonne ($10,132–$10,728/tonne), and the low end driven by recyclers offering discounted units. Sentiment in China remains weak, and several participants have suggested to us that domestic battery supply chain buyers are deliberately posting offers below the market in order to drag the assessment down ahead of pre-Golden Week stockpiling.

Cobalt metal shows the same fracture from a third angle, with European standard grade easing 0.6% w-o-w to $25.00–$27.20/lb, while Chinese domestic metal is assessed at around $20.00–$21.00/lb.

Falling cobalt sulphate and low metal prices in China have been used by some market participants to rationalise a significant fall in cobalt hydroxide bid.