I am coming back (again) on diversification. This time, we are briefly looking at the prices of two of our most important exports, Copper and Cobalt.
Cobalt has been on everyone's lips recently due to its crucial role in the manufacturing of electrical vehicles batteries.
As you can see in the graph below, the cobalt has reached 94 500 USD per tonne last year before significantly dropping below 35 000 USD per tonne. Our good old supply and demand friend did its thing again! As prices increased, more people became interested in extracting the stuff that was usually considered as a simple by-product of copper. As a result, the capacity of production significantly increased during the course of the year leading to the price drop.
The price may eventually increase due to the high demand but we do not really know when and that is the issue. Knowing that at least 76% of our exports comes from those two commodities, we are extremely reliant on the latter when it comes to revenues and FOREX reserves. The issue is that we have no control over those prices and therefore we should not plan our expenses based on uncertain revenues...
you can find more details on cobalt projection for 2019 in this article.
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| Cobalt price between March 2017 and January 2019 |
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| Evolution du prix du Cuivre sur les 12 derniers mois |
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