Two people at the same conference described the lithium market in terms that could not both be true.
An analyst from Traxys, a trading company, presented inventories as very high right now, and expected that to extend over the following months and keep prices low. An Australian miner came on afterwards and called it a load of rubbish, with an expletive Phoebe O'Hara declined to repeat.
O'Hara, battery raw materials analyst at Fastmarkets, was in the room for that exchange at the company's conferences in Singapore. What she took from it was not a verdict on who had it right.
It was that the view from the upstream in China is totally different from the view held by external partners, and that a Western-centric European analysis does not say so.
The problem is mapping the channels, not picking a side
Her framing of the working problem is precise: the industry is struggling to map its information channels. The advantage, then, sits with individuals who can hold that spread of information across both markets, West and East, rather than with whoever shouts loudest in one of them.
She is unequivocal about where the market's centre of gravity is. Nobody can sit outside Asia and expect to understand, report on or analyse the battery industry.
Three days there taught her more than the previous four months in the job. She only joined Fastmarkets in December, which puts that comparison in context.
The other thing she noticed was collective rather than contested. Conversations were running across the whole value chain, and everybody appeared to have arrived at the same conclusion at once. "This isn't a sidestream technology, this isn't something that's niche or something that's emerging, it's fully entrenched now."
Storage in India will probably grow faster than EVs
The panel she moderated on India left the strongest impression, and she calls it a space nobody is really talking about, in both energy storage and EVs.
The breadth of government policy being rolled out across those segments is what is drawing companies in. She and one of the panellists agreed that energy storage there is likely to grow quicker than the EV segment, partly because of that policy, partly because of the ease with which grid extensions are going in, and partly because of an accelerated renewable energy programme.
Set against that, the companies actually operating in the country told her something else. Nobody is really talking about them. Nobody is really looking at them.
Her reading of why is that the market gets dismissed as insufficiently developed, or as lacking the right infrastructure. The counter-evidence she offers is the growth of electric two and three wheelers, the fastest growing market of its kind in the world. Appetite and demand are already there, which makes the dismissal a judgement about attention rather than about the market.
What she draws from it goes wider than India. Grouping countries into a rest of world category, set against China, Europe and the United States, is a disadvantage to the battery industry itself, because it hides opportunities for growth and for upstream investment. The commitment she made out loud, as an analyst, is to pay more attention to those markets and to make sure different spaces have voices and get analysed accurately.
A history degree, and forecasting on ground nobody has mapped
O'Hara has zero background in science, and she volunteers it, particularly when she speaks in schools.
Her objection is to the idea now embedded in education that a university degree should map onto the job somebody ends up doing. The reality, as she sees it, is that plenty of people do work that is entirely separate from what they studied. She did a humanities degree, then a master's in international relations at the LSE, and was drawn to political risk because she was politically oriented. She started at Fitch Solutions as an autos analyst covering political and industry risk.
The battery question found her there, initially through exposure: what risks companies were carrying, mostly in the upstream, in the procurement of metals and in metal pricing. The volatility of the preceding 24 months was, in her word, insane. It was a world she knew nothing about, and the novelty is what drew her in.
Two things kept her. One is the green transition and the ethical line she personally reads in it. The other is the character of the analytical work itself, which is genuinely new ground. Everybody putting out forecasts is building off assumptions, hers included, and the most interesting exchanges she has with other forecasters are the ones where they compare the different problem-solving techniques each used to bridge the same gaps.
She describes going home to her partner, a mechanical engineer, with detailed discussion of battery chemistries and how they operate. His response is that it is mad, given she did a history degree.
For young people entering the sector she thinks the green transition supplies a driving force other industries may not currently have.
Balance is easier to set now than to correct later
The industry is nascent, and in her assessment quite corporate. Both facts point the same way on representation: patterns set early are cheaper than patterns corrected later.
Balanced events are the first item on her list, and she is specific about why. The research and lived experience agree that being able to see who you want to be has a real effect on the lives of young women, trans and non-binary people. In an industry at this stage, doing that now would be advantageous in a way it will not be in ten years.
The second is connecting people early to allies, whether male, female or any other gender, rather than leaving them to find them.
The third is where she is sharpest. Being overt about the fact that the sector is not as balanced as it could be, and treating that honesty as refreshing rather than awkward. "There's no point in hiding behind false narratives." Recognising the imbalance early means it can be tackled with the energy currently available to tackle it.
She does not want any of that quarantined. Networking events about the battery space can carry conversations about gender and inclusivity in the same room, rather than at the sidelines and separate, and she wants the spaces where people are joyful and excited about the work to be the same spaces.
The obstacle underneath all of it is that the sector remains opaque from outside. She notes that the industry is not really having this conversation yet, and that going into schools to talk to children about battery careers runs into the fact that it is still not very clear what that means.
This piece draws on the full conversation, which is available with a complete transcript on the episode page.