By Nick Toscano
One of Australia’s top lithium miners has lashed out at First-World auto giants for refusing to accelerate the transition from polluting cars, as a slowdown in electric vehicle sales pummels the price of battery metals and pushes producers to the brink.
Chris Ellison, the billionaire boss of Perth-based Mineral Resources, said on Thursday it was the “shittiest time” to be running a mining company exposed to the plunging price of lithium – a material needed to manufacture lithium-ion batteries that will power the growing global fleet of electric cars and store renewable energy.
Mineral Resources’ Chris Ellison says “it’s not a fun time” to be in the business as lithium prices languish.Credit: Trevor Collens
To ride out the protected lithium price rout that has forced other mines to close, Mineral Resources was aggressively slashing costs and would not pay a dividend to shareholders for the first time in more than 10 years, he said.
“Let’s be really, really clear … there are no lithium companies making money,” Ellison said.
“We’re throwing everything off the deck just to make sure we conserve cash.”
Australia is home to some of the world’s biggest known reserves of lithium, a metal often called “white gold” due to its silvery-white appearance and the fact it is an ingredient the world will need in far greater quantities to build batteries for electric cars and renewable energy.
Since the dawning of the electric vehicle era, automakers across the globe have been scrambling to lock in lithium supplies, striking long-term contracts with producers in Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
‘Let’s be really, really clear … there are no lithium companies making money. We’re throwing everything off the deck just to make sure we conserve cash.’
Chris Ellison
However, lithium prices have fallen sharply this year amid slowing EV sales. Analysts have attributed this to softer consumer demand in China and a combination of policy changes and higher interest rates elsewhere, which raise the cost of electric cars compared with internal combustion-engine vehicles.
On Thursday, Ellison also blamed global carmakers, which appeared content to continue profiting from polluting vehicle models and reluctant to spend money competing with Chinese makers, such as BYD, in developing low-cost and reliable electric passenger vehicles.
“Our lazy First-World car manufacturers ... all of the leaders of those companies are making great profits out of combustion engines,” he said. “They don’t want to invest the money and waste their profits on developing the electric vehicle.”
But the trend of transport electrification, which would ultimately demand far greater volumes of lithium than the world was currently supplying, was not going away, he said.
“The world’s not going to stop demanding we get carbon out of the atmosphere,” Ellison said.
“Probably by the time we get up around late ’26, early ’27, we’re going to see a big change in the supply and demand curve.”
It’s not the first time the lithium market has been rocked by a protracted downturn. In 2015, the price of the metal more than tripled in three years as the electric vehicle transition picked up pace while production of lithium was scarce.
However, as a relatively small and highly speculative market, lithium went from boom to bust by 2018 as a rush of new mines came on too soon and tipped the sector into oversupply, while cuts to Chinese subsidies temporarily put the brakes on the electric vehicle revolution.
Mineral Resources, which also mines iron ore in WA and runs a mining services business, told investors on Thursday its net profit for the year to June 30 had more than halved to $114 million.
Despite producing record output of hard-rock lithium, known as spodumene, from its Wodgina operation in WA, prices the company earned for its sales of the commodity collapsed by more than 75 per cent to $US1279 per dry metric tonne.
“We are battening down for the downturn while we feel like we’re dragging our feet along the bottom at the moment,” Ellison said.
While there were “challenging times ahead”, he stressed Mineral Resources was equipped to handle them.
“You just need to close your eyes and go, ‘We’re in a downturn’, no one is making money,” he said.
“We manage the business in line with the economic environment that we’re sitting in.”
Mineral Resources’ shares slumped on the news, closing more than 8 per cent lower at $40.61.
UBS analyst Lachlan Shaw said the company’s result was broadly as expected, but capital expenditure and cost forecasts for the year ahead were softer due to a “weak commodity price backdrop” and elevated debt levels.
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