CMOC mined 65,305 tonnes of cobalt in the first half. It sold 5,727.
That is 8.8% of production. The rest went to stock, which closed the half at 168,397 tonnes of contained cobalt, up 54.75% since December.
Read the rest of the same table, and that number stops looking like an operating failure.
Niobium: sold 104.3% of what it produced, drawing stock down. Molybdenum: 99.9%. Phosphate: 98.6%. Gold: 97.1%. Copper: 97.0%. Tungsten: 73.7%. Cobalt: 8.8%.
Five of those sit between 97% and 104%. Then tungsten steps down. Then cobalt falls off a cliff.
Cobalt is the only line in that table whose shipped volume is set by a host-government quota rather than by a mine plan. The Democratic Republic of Congo replaced its export ban with a quota system last October, and unshipped allocations were forfeited to the state at the end of June.
Cobalt revenue fell 44.87% while the cobalt price rose 94.22%.
Mine planning has always answered to grade, strip ratio and recovery. For a lengthening list of commodities, it now also answers to an export licence issued by someone with entirely different objectives.
That variable does not sit in any of the usual fields.
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