Critical Minerals Lithium

USGS 2025e in lithium content, not LCE. World 290 kt excluding withheld US output, up 31 percent. Consumption 263 kt. Australia, China and Chile are 72 percent of the printed total.

USGS 2025e: batteries 88 percent. This is an EV and storage chemical market, not a grid-metal market like copper.

USGS: mine output (ex-US) rose 31 percent in 2025e while consumption rose 20 percent. Oversupply concern kept prices low in the first half even as use grew.

USGS country output grouped by the process USGS describes as dominant there, not by company geology. China is mixed and plotted separately. US output is withheld.

Different units, not additive. Albemarle prints attributable lithium metal. SQM prints Chile LCE sales. Lithium Americas and Piedmont are pre-revenue.

The free series USGS prints, citing Benchmark. 2022 printed $63,700/t. 2025e printed $9,000/t. Not a monthly spot path.

Operating margin for the most recent fiscal year. This is what a commodity downcycle looks like in the accounts: the low-cost Chilean brine producer stays comfortably profitable while higher-cost hard rock producers and developers post losses.

Six years of operating margin. The arc from the 2022 peak, when lithium was the most profitable commodity in the world, to today is the sharpest boom-and-bust anywhere in this sector, and a caution against assuming strategic demand guarantees returns.

Revenue for the most recent fiscal year. Albemarle and SQM are the only two at meaningful scale; the rest are developers or early producers. Lithium Americas is absent because it is pre-revenue.