2026 Manganese Market Outlook: Supply Challenges Meet Battery Opportunity

After retreating in late 2024, the manganese market entered 2025 with mixed momentum. Despite robust demand indicators from the electric vehicle battery sector, price movements have remained muted, reflecting the complex interplay between tightening supply chains and growing production capacity. As 2026 unfolds, manganese finds itself at a critical juncture—facing oversupply risks on one side while structural tailwinds from the energy transition build on the other.

The first half of 2025 revealed how quickly market dynamics can shift. China’s port stocks fell to multi-year lows of approximately 3.7 million metric tons in early spring, with logistical constraints and steady consumption by alloy producers and steelmakers temporarily buoying ore prices to a 2025 high of $4.48 per metric ton. Yet this uptick proved short-lived. Production surged to around 10.1 million metric tons in H1 2025, fueled by robust export volumes from South Africa and Gabon alongside the resumption of Australian shipments that had faced disruptions the prior year. Simultaneously, global steel output—the sector commanding roughly 85 percent of manganese demand—weakened notably. Chinese steel production declined about 3 percent year-on-year amid softening domestic demand, though India and North America recorded modest gains. By mid-2025, the broader picture had shifted to one of ample supply and renewed downward pressure, with ore prices retreating to $4.21.

Structural Support Remains Despite Near-Term Weakness

Industry participants anticipated that manganese supply would continue climbing through the remainder of 2025, as leading Australian producers fully returned to market operations. Yet this expansion was expected to encounter headwinds from seasonal demand pullbacks and weakening global steel production. Major producers themselves acknowledged the risk: expanded capacity across the industry threatened to worsen oversupply, potentially triggering additional price compression.

Protectionist trade measures added another layer of uncertainty. The European Union’s newly implemented quotas on ferroalloys disrupted traditional trade flows and complicated alloy pricing dynamics, signaling a broader shift toward regional supply security rather than globally optimized sourcing. For manganese producers and traders, such developments underscored an uncomfortable reality: sufficient production capacity now exists to meet current demand, leaving prices vulnerable absent new demand catalysts.

Yet beneath the surface, a more optimistic narrative was emerging. Battery-related consumption of manganese—particularly high-purity grades for lithium-ion and next-generation EV chemistries—continued attracting renewed attention from automakers and cathode developers. While steelmaking remains manganese’s dominant end-use, the energy transition is quietly reshaping consumption patterns and creating new value pools.

Battery Technology: The Manganese Renaissance

The pivot toward manganese-rich cathode chemistries represents a pivotal shift in EV battery design. Automakers under intense cost pressures are actively exploring alternatives to dominant nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM) formulations, viewing manganese-based chemistries as a pathway to lower-cost, lower-complexity battery packs without sacrificing performance. At a June 2025 supply chain insights webinar, industry experts emphasized that manganese-rich chemistry “offers a good solution in terms of costs,” positioning the metal as an emerging answer to the cobalt and nickel dependence that has characterized EV supply chains to date.

High-nickel NCM batteries remain the current standard in many markets, particularly where supply chains have matured around Korean and Chinese battery makers. However, European and North American OEMs—facing supply chain fragility and price volatility—are accelerating development of manganese-forward alternative chemistries. Alongside NCM and lithium iron phosphate (LFP) formats, a new category is gaining traction: lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP) batteries, which offer a middle ground between cost and energy density.

The practical momentum is accelerating. In March 2025, Firebird Metals became Australia’s first company to produce LMFP EV batteries, a milestone highlighting the commercialization of manganese-intensive battery chemistries outside China. This achievement signals growing recognition of manganese’s role in cost-competitive, low-cobalt battery solutions destined for price-sensitive global markets. As the technology matures and scales, manganese consumption in battery applications is projected to grow steadily—not rapidly enough to displace steel as the dominant use case, but structurally meaningful enough to support prices and secure manganese’s role in the clean energy transition.

Analysts tracking battery raw materials noted, however, that near-term headwinds persist. Challenges within the NCM market and evolving EV subsidy schemes in China could dampen battery-grade manganese demand through early 2026. The market remains cyclical and sensitive to macroeconomic momentum in automotive production and EV adoption rates.

Geopolitics and Resource Nationalism Reshape Supply

The manganese supply picture is being redrawn by resource nationalism in Africa. Gabon, the world’s second-largest manganese exporter and source of 63 percent of U.S. manganese imports, announced in mid-2025 plans to implement an export ban on manganese ore beginning in January 2029. Gabon’s shipments of high-grade ore exceeded 7 million metric tons in 2024—material critical to both ferroalloy producers and emerging battery supply chains. A comprehensive export prohibition would tighten an already fragile global supply landscape, pressuring both Chinese buyers accustomed to Gabonese feedstock and European processors reliant on West African ore.

The timing compounds the risk. Australia’s GEMCO mine, historically a key high-grade source, is expected to wind down operations later this decade. Gabon’s export ban would eliminate another major pillar of global supply precisely when demand for high-quality manganese is projected to rise. The policy reflects Africa’s broader pivot toward value-addition: rather than exporting raw ore, countries are pursuing in-country processing through ferroalloy production or battery manufacturing to capture greater economic benefit.

However, ambitions can outpace capabilities. Large-scale manganese processing—whether ferroalloy or battery—requires substantial capital investment and technical expertise. China has demonstrated success in Africa through direct investment in mineral supply chains while maintaining high-value manufacturing onshore. African governments pursuing similar strategies without comparable capital or expertise risk seeing plans derail or execute at uncompetitive costs. The Project Blue market analysis noted that “without large-scale investments from China, such ambitious plans of African governments risk remaining unrealised.”

Countering this dynamic, the European Union has begun securing regional supply. In early 2025, Euro Manganese’s Chvaletice project in the Czech Republic received designation as a “strategic project” under the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act, signaling Brussels’ commitment to localizing battery material production. The designation accelerates permitting and investment, underlining the EU’s determination to reduce reliance on distant suppliers amid geopolitical tensions and energy transition requirements.

Balancing Oversupply Risk Against Long-Term Structural Growth

For 2026, industry forecasts point to a broadly balanced manganese market, though with meaningful pressures on both supply and demand fronts. Steel demand—still accounting for the overwhelming majority of manganese consumption—is expected to stabilize, with India’s expanding production providing a modest buffer against slower growth in China and Europe. Battery applications remain a secondary but rising contributor to demand, with structural importance increasing even if pricing impact remains limited in the near term.

Global market forecasts through 2035 project modest value and volume expansion, with Asia-Pacific retaining dominance while new opportunities emerge in electrification and high-purity material segments. Yet this baseline scenario contains significant downside risk: if production capacity additions outpace demand growth—a plausible scenario given announced expansions—oversupply could depress prices and threaten marginal producers’ economics for an extended period.

Looking toward early 2026, analysts caution against exuberance. Asian markets face seasonal demand troughs as Lunar New Year holidays approach, while uncertainty clouds China’s EV demand trajectory following recent subsidy scheme adjustments. The result is likely to be a market lacking dramatic price momentum, caught between structural supports from battery electrification and near-term headwinds from capacity additions and softening steel production growth.

For participants across the manganese value chain, 2026 presents a familiar dilemma: sufficient supply exists to meet current demand, yet insufficient new demand drivers have emerged to absorb announced production additions without price pressure. The resolution will depend on how quickly battery chemistries scale, how aggressively African resource nationalism reshapes supply, and whether macroeconomic conditions in China stabilize EV demand. Until then, manganese remains a commodity caught between two worlds—the fading dominance of steel and the rising promise of clean energy.