According to Mysteel OilChem's tracking, the anode material producers recently suffered from increasingly squeezed profit margins by rising petroleum coke prices and persistently low anode material prices. While anode producers have a strong desire to hike the prices, the supply structure is limiting their ability to do so.
Anode material production processes are primarily divided into artificial graphite, natural graphite, and others including MCMB, silicon-based anodes, and hard carbon anodes.
Artificial graphite anode technology is relatively mature, offering long cycle life, high safety, and low cost, making it suitable for power and energy storage batteries. In 2025, rapid growth in energy storage battery orders has increased demand for artificial graphite anodes. It currently holds an 88% share in the anode material market, up 1 percentage point from 2024.
Natural graphite primarily uses natural graphite such as flake graphite and spherical graphite as raw materials. Its production process boasts low energy consumption and performs well at low temperatures. However, it suffers from poor rate capability, easy deformation, and inferior performance compared to artificial graphite. Therefore, the market demand is gradually declining. Coupled with low profit margins, its market share continues to shrink, currently standing at 11%, down 1 percentage point from 2024.
Silicon-based anodes mainly include silicon-carbon and silicon-oxygen types. Challenges such as high silicon costs, expansion issues, and low commercial production volumes remain. Thus, capacity launching in this area has only begun in the past two years.
Over the next decade, graphite-based anode materials, including both artificial and natural graphite, will remain the mainstream products in the market. Meanwhile, silicon-based anodes are seeing increased application, with their commercialization process continuing to accelerate.
Furthermore, the anode material industry exhibits a high degree of concentration, with the top six producers holding a combined market share of 53.2%. And despite intense market competition, leading companies have achieved rapid growth by strengthening R&D innovation and implementing "differentiated" product strategies.
According to Mysteel OilChem, the industry's capacity is projected to reach 4.27 million tonnes by 2025, representing a yearly growth of 26%. This expansion is primarily driven by leading anode enterprises aiming to enhance integrated processes and capture greater market share, while capacity growth among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is limited, showing a noticeable deceleration.
Meanwhile, the total annual output is forecasted to be 2.52 million tonnes through 2025, indicating lingering issue of overcapacity. Leading companies are reducing costs and improving efficiency by establishing their own graphitization production lines. However, SMEs continue to face pressure from low-price competition. While leading enterprises maintain high operating rates, those below the first tier consistently operate below the industry average. Some manufacturers have been forced to cut the production or pivot their business models, intensifying the ongoing industry shake-up.
Written by Aggie Hu, huchenying@mysteel.com
