Chinese lithium firms back Nigerian processing plant

Nigeria’s first lithium-processing plant was launched to great fanfare this month with the backing of three companies, which at first glance look a lot like heavyweights of China’s battery-metals industry.

But the trio of firms behind the planned $250 million investment—Ganfeng Lithium Industry Ltd, Tianqi Lithium Industrial Ltd and Ningde Era Industrial Ltd—have nothing to do with three nearly identically named behemoths listed on the Shenzhen and Hong Kong stock exchanges, Bloomberg reports.

Instead, the West African country’s corporate register shows that they are wholly local ventures controlled by Chinese nationals that were founded last year at an address in a medium-sized southwestern Nigerian town.

“We are independent companies; please don’t make any confusion,” Kelvin Dai, the managing director of the Nigerian Ganfeng, noted by text message without answering questions on how and why the firm and its shareholders selected such recognizable names.

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The project is a response to the Nigerian government’s efforts to diversify the economy away from oil and tap into a predicted explosion in electric-vehicle sales that has transformed lithium, a vital component in rechargeable batteries, into one of the world’s most important commodities.

‘No formal affiliation’

The Nigerian Ganfeng, which is owned by the Nigeria-based Tianqi and Ningde Era, hosted Solid Minerals Minister Dele Alake at a ceremony in the northern Nasarawa State on October 12 to start building a facility the company said would take two years to complete and be able to refine 18,000 tonnes of lithium ore per day.

“My presence will provide moral support to deliver this project as fast as possible,” Alake said.

A week later, the Nigerian firm released a statement to the local media describing itself as a “renowned and reputable Chinese mining firm” that has “no formal affiliation whatsoever” with its much larger namesake.

A spokesperson for the Jiangxi-based Ganfeng Lithium Group Ltd, which is one of the world’s largest suppliers of lithium chemicals, noted in an email that the Nigeria-registered company was not one of its subsidiaries.

Alake didn’t respond to questions from Bloomberg about whether the Nigerian government was aware of the similarity of the names between the investors and the Chinese giants. Source: Bloomberg