News and market analysis

The growth is largely expected to be driven by stricter environmental regulations, increasing pressure from consumers and investors for sustainable products, and the region’s commitment to achieving carbon neutrality, according to sources.

After years of insufficient domestic supply that brought prices to record highs, China’s fluorspar supply tightness will ease in 2025 due to several newly developed mining sites as well as rising imports from Africa, sources told Fastmarkets, adding that demand from batteries, especially the energy storage sector (ESS), will continue to rise.

Over a decade since its first attempt, Glencore appears to have taken another tilt at Rio Tinto.

Investors in the US corn and soybean markets trimmed shorts while amassing longs in the week to Tuesday January 14, pushing the corn net long to the highest-level since May 2022 and moving soybeans from a net short to a net long for the first time in more than a year, data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) showed late on Friday January 17.

Fastmarkets will not publish any price assessments for US animal fats and oils; animal proteins; biomass-based diesel; hide and leather; grain and feed ingredients; organic/non-GMO; and vegetable oils on Monday January 20 due to the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in the US and the consequent closure for the day of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Fastmarkets proposes to discontinue its MB-NI-0141 nickel min 99.8% warrant premium, in-whs North Europe, price assessment.

Fastmarkets proposes to launch two price assessments for nickel warrant premiums for the European market.

Participants in the market for copper scrap and blister in China, the world’s largest importer of copper raw materials, expect there to be fiercer competition for material in 2025, industry sources told Fastmarkets in the week to Thursday January 9.

The biggest threat to keeping carbon emissions low in the steel industry is imports flowing in from regions where there is a lack of focus on emissions reduction, Kevin Dempsey, president and chief executive officer of the American Iron and Steel Institute, said at Fastmarkets’ second annual Circular Steel Summit on Wednesday January 15 in Houston, Texas.

Africa’s first transcontinental rail network, known as the Lobito Corridor, which aims to eventually connect almost the entire regional copper-cobalt belt with additional links across sub-Saharan Africa, is on track to break ground early in 2026, a senior official at the US Department of State told Fastmarkets.