World: slightly up, a tonne of cobalt is trading at 81,840 USD as of March 31, 2022
As of March 31, 2022, a tonne of cobalt recorded a slight price increase on the international market.
According to the London Metal Exchange (LME), which is the global industrial center for metals trading, a tonne of cobalt is trading at 81,840.00 US dollars at the end of March 2022 against 81,690.00 USD last week.
Thus, cobalt recorded a positive price gap of around USD 150 during this period.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), projections by experts from the National Commission on Mercurial Prices of the Ministry of Foreign Trade have indicated that Cobalt should register a slight drop in price on the international market.
According to data provided by experts from the Ministry of Foreign Trade, a tonne of cobalt should sell at 81,619.00 USD this week against 81,690.00 a tonne last week.
For this purpose, this product should record a negative deviation of -71 USD during this period.
It should be emphasized that the price of raw materials is never fixed on the market.
Thus, specialists from London Metal Exchange (LME) explain that it depends on its stock price.
This situation of the improvement in cobalt prices on the international market should make the Government of the Democratic Republic of Congo happy, which, through its soil, has almost half of the world’s cobalt production.
Unfortunately, the Congolese government is failing in its mining governance.
According to the 2021 Natural Resource Governance Index, the governance of the mining industry in 7 out of 13 countries is “weak” or “insufficient” with the Democratic Republic of Congo having the weakest governance of all countries.
During a session with the media last week in Kinshasa, the NGO Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) had recommended to the Government of the DRC to put in place a policy of good governance in the mining sector in order to benefit the population the fallout from the cobalt market.
For this NGO, the DRC is in a unique position, but limited in time: “cobalt, of which it has the largest deposits in the world, is an essential element for the production of batteries for electric vehicles. »
