Nickel prices during a bid broke a ten-year record and reached 24.43 thousand dollars per ton – this is the maximum since 2011. This is evidenced by the data of the London Exchange of Metals LME. The volume of nickel reserves on LME from October 2021 decreased every day, the indicator collapsed with more than 143 thousand tons to 94,830 tons, clarifies Reuters.
Rally on the market is due to several factors. As Bloomberg explains, first of all it is due to interruptions in the supply chain and exhaustion of reserves against the background of demand recovery.
“In addition to recent liquidity weakening in China, an extremely limited metal supply is a rally key factor,” confirmed Shanghai East Asia Futures analyst Van Yue. The demand for nickel is growing and because the metal is one of the key materials for creating electric car batteries.
Another price increase factor – concerns about lower supplies from Indonesia, the world’s largest nickel supplier. The country is going to introduce tax on the export of nickel products this year. Analyst BMO Capital Markets Colin Hamilton said that in order to prevent further reduction in nickel reserves in 2022, its deliveries will have to increase by 200 thousand tons.
According to forecasts of the International Energy Agency (MEA), by 2040 copper, nickel and graphite will begin to dominate in demand for minerals. By this time, the level of copper consumption on the part of environmentally friendly energy technologies will grow by 2.7 times compared with 2020.