* A court in Southwest China will put 21,000 kg, or 21 tonnes, of cobalt metal formerly held by the Fanya Metal Exchange up for auction on Oct. 5, according to a notice on e-commerce platform Taobao.
* The online sale, which will be held over a 24-hour period ending at 1000 Beijing time (0200 GMT) on Oct. 6, is the latest in a series of auctions held by the Kunming Intermediate People’s Court looking to raise funds to pay back Fanya’s creditors after the bourse collapsed in 2015.
* The base price is around 3.917 million yuan ($549,854), or 186,500 yuan ($26,184) a tonne, although the auction page put the market value of the inventory at around 4.896 million yuan.
* London Metal Exchange prices for cobalt have risen by about 42% since early August to $37,000 a tonne after Glencore said it would shut its Mutanda mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for two years, but are still way down from a peak of almost $100,000 a tonne in March 2018 as supply overwhelmed the market.
* World mine supply of cobalt, a key ingredient in batteries for electric vehicles, last year stood at 140,000 tonnes on a metal content basis, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, most of it from the DRC.
* In the last Fanya auction, China Molybdenum Co won more than 28,000 tonnes of ammonium paratungstate with a bid of around 3.27 billion yuan in the only sale to date to beat the stipulated market value. - Source: Reuters-