The lead price keeping steady faces repeated negative factors looming on the long-term perspective in particular. The present LME lead value still defenses $2,000 level per ton on the shed of the LME stock and unstable supply of lead concentrate, but is expected to nosedive in case of the supply plethora.
According to the foreign news, the EU agreed to the reduction of CO2 scheduled to cut by 30 percent of the 2019 CO2 emission quantities coming out from Buses and Large Trucks by 2030.
The EU countries have continued to discuss the matter to terminate the production of internal combustion engine vehicles since a couple of years last, by which Norway and Netherlands will end the production thereof by 2025, and Germany, India and France by 2030 and the UK by 2040 respectively.
In 2018, the global lead consumption was 11,734,000 tons, of which the EU demand accounted for 16 percent to 1,929,000 tons. The industry experts claim that the reduction of CO2 should follow the suspension of internal combustion engine vehicles production.
In case of lead, over 80 percent of the entire production is used for the lead battery production, and therefore it will be significantly affected by the cuts of automotive production, the experts claimed. In this case, the market for electric vehicle is expected to improve rapidly, encouraging the corporate to speed up investment.
In particular, the prices for lithium and cobalt lowered to a large extent compared with the 2018 peak, helping recue the manufacturing cost of lithium battery around 2020 when the function of safety of lithium batteries are expected to get technologically improved.
For instance, LG Chemical saw its revenue on sale continuing to increase since the second quarter of 2017, in the battery business division in particular, while resulting in a very high rate of return from the third quarter last year. LG Chemical is expected to extend investment overseas including China, possibly making progress in the future battery business division.
Source: Steel&Metal News |
