Oversupply in BattMats Leads to 80% Fall in Lithium Price in 1 Year

Lithium, a key raw material in batteries for electric vehicles, has fallen in price, with oversupply and a scaling back in EV production forecasts. 

Lithium carbonate trades at around 95 000 CNY/tonne from around almost but not quite 500 000 CNY/tonne at the same point last year. Its absolute peak was in November 2022 at just over 600 000 CNY/tonne. 

At the time of this update, 1 USD buys 7.18 CNY.

China is the world's largest electric vehicle market, where EV penetration continues to grow but at a slower rate. At the end of 2023, Goldman Sachs cited the trend in a report entitled "The Short Trade Must Go On" highlighting both supply and demand drivers.

For a good introduction to lithium's role in the energy transition, the following report from IRENA (the International Renewable Energy Agency) is worth reading.

Clearlake and Insight to Acquire Alteryx for $4.4bn

Clearlake Capital Group LP with Insight Partners (co-founded by Colorado-based Twitter investor Jerry Murdock) have agreed to acquire Irvine, CA-based Alteryx (NYSE:AYX), a cloud analytics platform company, in a $4.4bn definitive agreement. Regulatory and stockholder approvals are required.  Alteryx will then become a privately held portfolio company of Clearlake and Insight.

Competitors of Alteryx include Tableau, DataDog and even Microsoft Power BI. 

DataDog has more of a niche around cloud infrastructure metrics and supports AWS, Azure, GCP, RedHat OpenShift and VMWare amongst others and raised substantial capital in a Series D funding round led by ICONIQ Capital.