Cobalt — A Complete Market Guide (2026)

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:00:00 +0200

Data as of 6 September 2026. Prices are quoted as multi-year and full-year averages, not a single day’s snapshot, so this report stays useful over time. Reserves, production splits, balances and historical series are estimates from agency and industry data, rounded for clarity. This report is for information only and was prepared with AI assistance — see the disclaimer at the end.

Cobalt is the metal nobody sets out to mine. Roughly 99% of it comes out of the ground as a by-product of copper and nickel, which means the cobalt market’s own price has almost no power to call forth new supply — and that single fact explains every boom and bust in its history. It is also the commodity where politics has most visibly seized the wheel: in February 2025 the Democratic Republic of the Congo, source of three-quarters of world output, simply banned cobalt exports, then replaced the ban with a hard export quota running to 2027 — and the price roughly tripled. This report is the free, big-picture primer on how the cobalt market actually works: where it comes from, why supply is deaf to price, who refines it, what it is used for, and which economic regimes favour it. For the company-level data behind the charts — every producer screened by production, resources and cost — go to Metal Pilot.

Cobalt on Metal Pilot Blog

Cobalt — A Complete Market Guide (2026)