중국 전기차 보조금 크게 문제되지 않는다

올해부터 중국 전기차 보조금 혜택이 줄어들면서 전기차 및 리튬 수요가 떨어질 것이라고 하는데 크게 동의하진 않는다. 아래는 알버말 컨퍼런스 콜 중 일부. 알버말 경영진 말대로 seasonality가 늘 있고 전기차 보조금 없애고 나서도 수요는 높게 유지되는 경향이 있다. 

 

David Begleiter

Thank you. Good morning. Eric, just on lithium spot price in China, it's not a major focus of ours. We have seen continued softening over the last few weeks. What do you make of that?

 

Eric Norris

David, I would say it has a lot to do with what Kent described in his remarks. We've come off out of a period of time in 2022 of remarkable growth, that exceeded expectations in terms of EV production and was going at a pretty heady pace when the decision was taken to reopen the economy and then -- and of course, you know what happened thereafter. I mean the virus spread quite rapidly, and it did staff consumer demand at a time when seasonally, it was weak anyway because of the Lunar New Year.

 

I think there's much been made about the subsidies as well rolling off, but those have been rolling off for several years. Some of them have been extended at the provincial level, and some of the more meaningful subsidies are at the state and local level anyway. So we don't think that, that's a big issue, and we've certainly seen that in prior years have initially a spike in demand immediately before the subsidy comes off, a drop in demand right after it comes off and then a rebound in demand.

 

Our projection and our customers' view is that this year, particularly in the second half, we'll see that growth that's projected of close to 40%. In the meantime, people are buying under contracts, but not venturing into the spot market and bringing their -- in China, bringing their inventories down quite low, because we're in this post-holiday period with still some uncertainty in the very near term. We expect that to be short-lived though with the demand rebound later this year.