On the evening of July 31, Huayou Cobalt (603799) announced that the company's holding subsidiaries Huayou New Energy Technology (Quzhou) Co., Ltd. and Huayou (Hong Kong) Co., Ltd. signed a supply framework agreement with Tesla. The agreement stipulates that the companies plan to supply the battery material ternary precursor products to Tesla from July 1, 2022 to December 31, 2025. According to Huayou Cobalt, the signing of this supply framework agreement has further strengthened the company's competitiveness in the field of new energy lithium battery materials, which is in line with the interests of the company and its shareholders. The company will confirm its revenue in the relevant years according to the performance of the agreement, which is expected to have a positive impact on the company's operating performance from 2022 to 2025.
In 2022, Huayou Cobalt will continue to broaden its "circle of friends" and open up the upstream and downstream of the industry chain to accelerate the arrangements for integration. On April 28, Huayou Cobalt announced the signing of a cooperation framework agreement with PT Vale Indonesia Tbk (hereinafter referred to as "Vale Indonesia"). The two parties plan to collaborate on a high pressure acid leaching project (hereinafter referred to as the "HPAL project") using limonite ore as raw materials to treat limonite from Vale Indonesia's Pomalaa mine. The planned production capacity of the project is an annual output of MHP with no more than 120,000 tons of nickel content. Previously, Huayou Cobalt also reached strategic cooperation intentions with Volkswagen and Tsingshan Holding Group Company to jointly make arrangements for the mining of nickel and cobalt resources in Indonesia, as well as such businesses for power battery cathode material integration as nickel and cobalt refining with sulfate, precursor processing and cathode material production. The planned scale of construction of the tripartite joint venture can meet the supply of nickel and cobalt raw materials required for about 160GWh of batteries.
In addition, in July this year, Huayou Cobalt signed a memorandum of cooperation with Ford Motor and Vale Indonesia. Based on the strategic cooperation intention reached by the company and Vale Indonesia earlier, the two parties plan to bring in Ford Motor to jointly plan and build a HPAL project, after the completion of which the company will convert nickel products into battery material products and supply them to Ford Motor. Meanwhile, LG Energy Solution announced that it will establish a battery recycling joint venture with Huayou Cobalt in China to extract nickel, cobalt and lithium from used batteries using Huayou Cobalt's infrastructure, which will then be supplied to LG Energy Solution's Nanjing plant.
In the meantime, Huayou Cobalt has established in-depth partnerships with many large international enterprises to continuously accelerate lithium battery material integration, making arrangements for nickel, cobalt and lithium resources in the upstream, engaging in product development and capacity expansion in the downstream, and locating downstream end customers in advance to continuously improve its competitiveness and consolidate its leading position.
Based on its performance in the first half of 2022, Huayou Cobalt is expected to make a profit of over 2.2 billion yuan in the first half of this year, a year-on-year increase of over 49.86%. The company says that the estimated boost in performance is mainly due to the remarkable results achieved in the implementation of the company's business strategy of high-end products and industrial integration.
Huayou Cobalt says that the first half of this year has seen a continued and rapid increase in the demand for new energy lithium battery materials, varying levels of growth in the output and sales of the company's nickel products and new energy lithium battery materials, and a significant increase in the prices of cobalt and nickel battery metals compared with the same period last year, and better profitability of main products compared with the same period last year. Huayou Cobalt's integrated development model of expanding to the downstream after conquering the upstream has brought long-term stable resource advantages and cost reduction advantages to the company, whose future development is more eagerly anticipated.