China’s first-quarter surge in lithium battery exports points to two forces working in the same direction: a structural rise in overseas demand for storage and electrification equipment, and a short-term rush to ship before tax policy turned less favorable.

Customs data showed lithium battery exports up 50.4% year on year in the first quarter, a clear acceleration from the 26% growth recorded across full-year 2025. EV and wind-turbine exports also posted strong double-digit gains in the same quarter.

The disruption to leaching chemicals in Congo is a reminder that the fallout from the Iran war is not limited to headline commodities like crude oil and LNG. It is now reaching into the specialized chemical inputs that sit behind copper and cobalt production, and that matters because Congo is central to the global supply chain for both metals.

The country is the world’s top cobalt producer and Africa’s largest copper supplier, so any production restraint there quickly becomes relevant for electric vehicles, batteries, and the broader clean-energy transition.

The European Union’s launch of the critical minerals arm of its joint procurement platform is an important sign that Brussels is moving from diagnosis to mechanism in its effort to reduce dependence on Chinese-controlled supply chains.

The new raw-materials window of the EU Energy and Raw Materials Platform opened for buyer submissions on April 13 and will begin its first round of buyer-supplier matchmaking this month, focused on rare earths, battery materials, and defense-related raw materials, with results due in September.

The European Union’s preliminary deal to slash tariff-free steel imports and double duties on excess shipments marks a major turn in its industrial trade policy. The agreement would cap tariff-free imports at 18.3 million metric tons a year, a 47% reduction versus 2024 levels, while raising the tariff on out-of-quota shipments from 25% to 50%.

The stated aim is to lift EU steelmakers’ capacity utilization from roughly 65% back toward 80%, after years of pressure from global overcapacity and, more recently, from US tariffs that have redirected foreign steel toward Europe.

The case for a new commodities supercycle is becoming harder to dismiss, but it is still better understood as a regime shift than as a guarantee that every raw material will rise together. The immediate catalyst has been the Iran war, which delivered an historic oil shock and tightened physical energy markets in ways that are still not fully unwinding.

At the same time, longer-running forces were already in place before the war: stronger demand for copper and other industrial metals from electrification and AI infrastructure, renewed stockpiling behavior, and a more fragmented geopolitical environment in which countries are willing to pay more for secure supply.

The war in the Middle East may end up giving Australia an unexpected opening in green iron by weakening one of the rival regions that had looked best placed to dominate the early market for low-carbon iron products. Before the conflict, the Gulf was emerging as a strong candidate for direct reduced iron and hot briquetted iron production because it combined access to energy, industrial capital, export infrastructure, and a strategic location between ore suppliers and steel consumers.

That model now looks less secure. The damage to regional energy infrastructure and the exposure of shipping through Hormuz have forced a reassessment of whether the Middle East can still be treated as a reliable platform for large-scale green iron investment.

China is being forced to rework its energy import map because the war-related disruption in the Gulf has exposed just how heavily its fuel system still depends on the Middle East. In 2025, the region supplied roughly half of China’s combined imports of crude oil, refined fuels, LNG, and LPG. Since the conflict began, that dependence has become a liability rather than an advantage, as shipping through Hormuz has been choked and Gulf-origin cargoes have become harder to secure.

The biggest adjustment has been in crude oil. Middle Eastern crude accounted for about 52% of China’s oil imports in 2025, but that share dropped to about 31% in May, a multi-year low. From January through May, crude shipments from the Middle East to China fell 28% from a year earlier, while buyers turned more heavily to Brazil and Russia to make up part of the shortfall.

China’s copper smelters are moving closer to production cuts because the one factor that had been cushioning their economics, the boom in sulphuric acid prices, is now under threat. Smelters have been suffering from an extreme shortage of copper concentrate, which has driven spot treatment charges for imported concentrate to deeply negative levels.

Those fees, which miners pay smelters to process ore, fell to a record low of minus $77 per ton on April 10, compared with minus $28.6 a year earlier. In normal market conditions, that kind of collapse would already have forced much broader output restraint.