Graphite's Price Fell While Its Strategic Importance Rose
Graphite prices dropped from $4,200 to about $1,800 a tonne between 2022 and 2025, even as battery demand and export controls made it more critical.
Graphite’s price history runs counter to the usual critical-minerals narrative: it fell sharply between 2022 and 2025, even as battery demand grew and China tightened export controls on graphite in 2023, a real, documented policy move, not a hypothetical risk.
A rough but telling concentration number
Treating China’s 78% mine share and the rest of the world as two buckets gives an HHI of roughly 6,568, and the true figure accounting for Madagascar, Tanzania, Brazil, and Mozambique individually would be only slightly lower. Either way, this sits well above cobalt’s already-extreme mine-supply HHI, and the processing-stage figure, 99% for spherical graphite covered on the supply chain page, is higher still.
Why the price still fell
New mine and processing capacity, both in China and in newer sources like Madagascar and Mozambique, expanded faster than demand growth over this period, a supply-side oversupply correction structurally similar to the pattern documented on lithium’s economics page, not evidence that graphite’s strategic importance is overstated. Export controls and genuine criticality can coexist with a falling price if supply simply grows faster than demand for a few years, exactly what appears to have happened here.
Sources: price history and export control developments are widely reported in industry press (Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, Reuters); HHI is computed from this project’s own published production data; the 2,500 HHI threshold is the US Department of Justice/FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines convention.