Once again the market has been swamped by over-production in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world’s dominant source of the battery metal.

But while it was an artisanal mining surge that caused the bust of 2018-2019, this time around it’s China’s giant CMOC Group (603993.SS)

The company more than doubled its output of cobalt last year, pumping nearly 60,000 tons of extra metal into a global market of just over 200,000 tons.

It doesn’t help that cobalt’s bright new energy narrative is starting to unravel as the electric vehicle (EV) sector evolves.

Cobalt’s demand profile has been transformed by its use in EV batteries but the metal’s prospects look a little less stellar than a couple of years ago.

The EV revolution is rapidly evolving. The Chinese market is shifting towards greater sales of hybrids, which need a smaller battery than a pure electric vehicle, and towards lithium-iron-phosphate battery chemistry which needs no cobalt at all.

Western EV manufacturers are still largely sticking with nickel-cobalt-manganese cathode chemistry but while Chinese EV sales rose by 36% last year, North American sales growth was a modest 9% and the European market actually contracted.