Negative material collective limit! Lithium battery market broke out again and graphitization price rose sharply Ⅰ

Recently, the capital market for "elements" speculation is not new, at the beginning of the high prosperity of new energy vehicles ignited the market of lithium, nickel, copper, aluminum, rare earth and cobalt plate, and later, with the addition of photovoltaic plate, the price of silicon also soared, to view the high quality graphite electrodes. 

Haitong even released a "decisive battle of the periodic table" research report in early August, suggesting that investors can continue to deeply explore the periodic industry.

In fact, the market has also verified this judgment. The recent market can be said to be "aluminum war aluminum victory", "coal flying color dance", and rare earth nonferrous metals also continued to rise.

Today, the red trading wave has turned back to lithium batteries. In the whole lithium plate, 15 stocks rose by the limit, and ZHONGKE ELECTRICAL and GOLDEN MILIKY WAY SEAL the 20cm limit; 100 billion negative material giant PUTAILAI trading limit; TONZE, BAOSTEEL, SHANSHAN shares and other stocks rose by the limit, and CATL also rose by more than 5% again.

From today's trading limit of individual stocks, this wave of wind is blowing from the negative electrode material of lithium battery. ZHONGKE ELECTRICAL, PUTAILAI, BAOSTEEL and SHANSHAN are among the leading stocks.

What role does graphite play?

1 Industrial chain of negative electrode materials

On the news, on the evening of September 13, CATL announced that it planned to invest in the construction of CATL new lithium battery production base (Yichun) project in Yichun City, Jiangxi Province, with a total investment of no more than 13.5 billion yuan.

So it seems that this wave of market should be the outbreak of lithium battery plate, and segmentation, graphite is also a very important part of the whole industry chain.

From the perspective of the properties of itself, graphite is a kind of carbon allotropes, chemical stability, strong resistance to high temperature, thermal conductivity, the conductivity is higher than general non-metallic mineral 100 times, and graphite functional materials are widely used in metallurgical, chemical, machinery and equipment, new energy vehicles, nuclear power, electronic information, aerospace and defense and other industries.

The whole power battery is composed of positive material, negative material, electrolyte and diaphragm. The negative material is second only to the positive material accounting for 50% in the cost composition of power battery,  and the proportion is 10%-15%. Graphite is the main component of negative material.

Negative materials are mainly divided into carbon materials and non-carbon materials. The former is mainly carbon based system, including artificial graphite, natural graphite and hard carbon; The latter is silicon-based materials, tin based materials and so on. Between the two, the highest degree of market application is the graphite negative material in carbon materials, which has large-scale industrial application.

At present, carbon negative materials are widely used in the market with good cycle life and low cost. At present, carbon material gram capacity has reached 360mAh/g, which is close to the theoretical gram capacity of 372mAh/g. The strong demand for carbon negative materials downstream has been obvious to all in the market.

From the technical point of view, natural graphite contains many impurities, and has the disadvantages of large expansion and poor electrolyte compatibility. Therefore, artificial graphite is the main raw material of negative electrode materials at present. However, the widely used artificial graphite negative material has certain production difficulties. Its production process can be divided into four steps: pretreatment, granulation, graphitization and ball milling screening.

Among them, steps 1 and 4 are relatively simple and do not require too much investment; However, granulating and graphitization are different. The disposal of graphitized resistance waste requires stable customer resources of steel plant and aluminum plant. In order to control the cost, it also needs to build a graphitized base and invest more in fixed assets. Therefore, the negative electrode material industry also uses high technical barriers.

As a typical manufacturing industry, the cost of negative materials is mainly affected by processing fees and the price of direct materials, of which direct materials account for 40%.

The raw materials of artificial graphite include petroleum coke and needle coke, and needle coke is selected as the mainstream raw material with more stable and excellent properties. However, due to the late start in China, there are fewer enterprises in the industry layout, the early oil needle coke can only rely on imports from Japan and Britain.

However, with the continuous catch-up, by the end of 2020, the total production capacity of needle coke in China had reached 1.5 million tons, including 690,000 tons of oil needle coke, increase of 102% year on year; Coal series needle coke for 80 tons, year-on-year growth of 23%. From the data, the comprehensive utilization rate of needle coke does not exceed 30%, there is overcapacity, so the price performance also tends to be stable.

At present, the price of needle coke is basically maintained at 6,500 yuan/ton, although it has increased by about 1,000 yuan per ton compared with the beginning of 2021, the price of raw materials will not rise significantly from the current production capacity of needle coke.

However, another 50% of the cost of negative electrode materials is composed of processing fees. With the promotion of the national goal of "carbon neutralization", all localities are implementing the policy of double control of energy consumption. Therefore, the power supply of large negative electrode graphitization enterprises has been partially limited, and the gap between supply and demand has widened.

At present, the mainstream quotation of negative electrode graphitization OEM is 18,000 yuan -- 22,000 yuan/ton, and the partial zero unit price reaches 23,000 yuan/ton, up about 70% compared with the fourth quarter of 2020. From this point of view, the rise of processing costs is also another factor to stimulate the continuous rise of stock prices, to get the latest graphitization news from us.