The price for spent lead-acid batteries and scrap lead witnessed a significant decline and dropped to the lowest level which is $41-42 cwt in more than 14 months.
At the same time, the price for resmelt lead dropped by an average of $5 per hundredweight to $82-84 per cwt. And the price for cable lead fell by $4 per cwt to $86-88 per cwt.
So much downward pressure in price made the secondary lead material suppliers hard to get any bargaining room when they negotiate with their intended buyers, mainly the lead smelter. A source in lead smelter industry said few of lead smelter already closed their purchasing accesses since they have far more enough lead materials in stock.
A combination of multiple factors aligned together to result in this swift and precipitous drop. On one side, the LME’s three-month lead contract went down and kept on hovering in a narrow range recently. Besides that, there are excess amount of newly expired lead-acid batteries in the market since the hot weather weeded out tons of old batteries. Many other factors in the domestic and foreign market coupled with the most significant two above to generate the current outpacing demand for secondary lead materials. The price is most like slip further.
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