Graphite Market Trends: H1 2026 Review and Forecast

Graphite prices have stayed under pressure through the first half of 2026 despite steady growth in battery demand, a disconnect that Amy Bennett, principal consultant at Fastmarkets, says comes down to one persistent factor: China’s grip on the supply side.

Speaking with the Investing News Network at the Fastmarkets Global Battery and Critical Materials Conference in Las Vegas, Bennett laid out why graphite — the material that makes up roughly a third of total battery weight and about half the weight of a typical NCM cell, remains, in her words, “at a crossroads.”

The scale of Chinese control over graphite has actually grown since Beijing first introduced export controls on the sector at the end of 2023. At that point China accounted for around 60 percent of mined natural graphite supply.

Rather than triggering the diversification the rest of the world expected, the controls had the opposite effect: China flooded the market with more material, prices fell, and Western producers were squeezed out.

China’s share of mined natural graphite has since climbed to around 80 percent, while its overall grip on the graphite anode market — natural and synthetic combined — now sits near 98 percent, with more than 95 percent of global anode processing capacity.

“There is an imbalance between the actual level of demand and the supply that we’re seeing controlled by China,” Bennett said. “China has been able to keep these prices at artificially low levels, and they’re really maintaining a strong grasp on this market.”

Bennett doesn’t expect that to change quickly. “In the near term, yeah, irreplaceable,” she said of China’s role in the anode supply chain. “I would say I think any real shift in that control of the supply chain is at least five years out.”