On the nickel demand side, stainless steel and ternary batteries account for 75% and 7% of nickel’s terminal demand, respectively. Looking forward to 2022, ZAIHUI expect that the growth rate of stainless steel production will decline, and the growth rate of demand for primary nickel will drop from 16.5% in 2021 to 3.5%; in terms of ternary batteries, benefiting from the trend of high nickelization, the demand for nickel will increase year-on-year. It rose 82% to 457,000 tonnes.
On the supply side, new projects for nickel pig iron, wet process and fire process are planned to be put into production in 2022, mainly in Indonesia. With the release of low-cost nickel pig iron production in Indonesia, the growth rate of demand from stainless steel will slow down, and nickel pig iron will become surplus, and the discount to nickel price will increase, and domestic high-cost nickel pig iron producers using grid power will become marginal producers. , continued to reduce production in the face of poor profits and China’s energy consumption control. Regarding the new supply of nickel products for battery materials, in addition to the Indonesian wet-process and pyro-process projects, new domestic projects using recycled metals to produce nickel sulfate will also contribute to the increase. ZAIHUI expect the consumption of pure nickel at the battery raw material end in 2022. also declined.
Overall, ZAIHUI expect global primary nickel demand and supply to increase by 10.4% and 16.6% year-on-year respectively in 2022, and the balance of supply and demand will gradually shift from a gap to a small surplus. However, there is still a small gap in the global primary nickel supply and demand, and the inventory may continue to be destocked, but the extent is weaker than the degree of destocking in 2021. In terms of China’s import and export, we believe that with the successive production of projects for the production of high nickel matte by the Indonesian fire process and the production of nickel-cobalt intermediate products by the wet process, the growth rate of China’s nickel-cobalt intermediate products and nickel pig iron imports will increase in 2022; Import demand, but the growth rate may be slower than in 2021.
Post time: Apr-22-2022