Cobalt Market Trends: H1 2026 Review and Forecast
Cobalt’s recovery gathered pace in Q2 as the export control regime imposed by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continued to choke off Chinese refinery feedstock and push prices to their highest levels in years.
The DRC mines roughly three-quarters of the world’s cobalt, giving it significant leverage over global battery supply chains. After cobalt prices fell to multi-year lows in 2024 amid a supply glut, Kinshasa suspended cobalt exports outright on February 21, 2025, arguing that prevailing prices no longer reflected the resource’s strategic value.
That blanket ban gave way in October 2025 to a quota system, which caps how much cobalt hydroxide and cobalt metal each miner can ship out of the country per quarter.
At the Fastmarkets Global Lithium, Battery & Critical Materials conference, Rob Searle, senior battery raw materials analyst at Fastmarkets, reported that standard-grade cobalt hydroxide prices surged roughly 167 percent between January 2025 and June 2026. This rally began when the DRC first restricted exports in February 2025.
Fastmarkets CEO Raju Daswani also underscored the tailwinds in the cobalt space during the event’s opening keynote.
“If you look at cobalt prices, they’re up 70 percent (since June 2025), and that’s been proven by the quotas that have been imposed by the major producing country, the Democratic Republic of Congo,” he said.
He grouped that rally alongside sharp gains in lithium and nickel prices as evidence that the multi-year correction across the battery raw materials industry is now firmly over.
From oversupply to a government-managed squeeze
The turnaround marks a dramatic reversal from conditions just two years ago. Searle noted that DRC mine supply nearly doubled between 2021 and 2025, rising from around 150,000 metric tons to close to 300,000 metric tons as Chinese-backed copper-cobalt miners expanded capacity to lock in concentrate for their own refineries.
That growth wasn’t matched by demand, and cobalt prices collapsed to multi-year lows by late 2024 and early 2025, a level Kinshasa judged uneconomic for a resource it considers strategically critical.
The government’s response came in two waves.
An export ban on February 21, 2025, sparked an initial price surge, though shipping lags delayed the volume impact.
A sharper price hike occurred in October 2025, when the DRC introduced a producer-specific quota system.
The move saw standard prices spike to US$41,879.80 per metric ton, according to TradingEconomics, representing a 71 percent increase from January 2025’s level of US$24,424.40.
The country further flexed its grip on the sector in June of this year, when it announced that unused export quota amounts would not roll over and instead would be reclaimed by the government.
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