Who Really Owns the World’s Cobalt? New Framework Tracks Investment and Trade Flows

Cobalt has become one of the most geopolitically charged materials on the planet, an essential ingredient in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles, smartphones and grid-scale storage. Yet the way this metal is distributed across the world has long been measured in a deceptively simple way: by counting where cobalt is dug out of the ground. A new study published in Nature Communications argues that this production-based view misses most of the story. Researchers led by Lei Liu and Jun Chen of Nanjing University have built a dual-attribution framework that traces cobalt availability through two very different channels, corporate ownership of mining assets on one hand and international trade in refined and semi-processed products on the other, revealing that the global map of who effectively controls cobalt looks radically different from the map of where cobalt is mined.

The framework, which covers 193 countries and 36 territories, rests on a conceptual distinction between primary and secondary availability. Primary availability attributes cobalt according to the corporate ownership of the mines and processing facilities that extract it, asking which countries’ firms and investors hold the equity stakes that give them claims on output. Secondary availability attributes cobalt according to international trade, following the metal as it moves across borders in concentrates, intermediates and refined chemicals. The authors then compare both attribution perspectives against a combined baseline scenario built from geographic production and pre-trade viewpoints, which represents the traditional way of thinking about mineral endowment. The gap between the baseline and the ownership- and trade-adjusted pictures quantifies, for the first time in a systematic way, how much foreign direct investment and trade each reshape national cobalt access.

This matters because cobalt supply is extraordinarily concentrated. A handful of countries, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo dominating mine output, produce the overwhelming majority of the world’s primary cobalt, and a small number of refining hubs, most prominently China, process the bulk of intermediate materials into battery-grade compounds. Under a purely geographic lens, most countries appear to have essentially no cobalt availability at all. But ownership and trade complicate that picture enormously. Mining companies headquartered in one country routinely operate assets in another, and the resulting output flows through multi-stage supply chains that crisscross the globe before ending up in cathodes and finished batteries. The new framework is designed to capture exactly these layers of indirection.

The headline quantitative findings are striking. Relative to the combined baseline scenario, total cobalt availability is higher in 63.6 percent of the countries analyzed, meaning that when ownership and trade are taken into account, nearly two-thirds of nations end up with more effective access to cobalt than their geological endowment or territorial production would suggest. When the researchers weight primary and secondary availability equally in a composite measure, 72.7 percent of countries show a positive change. In other words, the mechanisms of globalized investment and commerce are not zero-sum transfers that enrich a few intermediaries at everyone else’s expense; for most countries, participation in these networks increases the cobalt they can effectively draw upon.

Perhaps the most consequential result, however, concerns concentration. Foreign direct investment and international trade do not change the total amount of cobalt available to humanity, the global sum is fixed by geology and extraction economics. What they do change is how that fixed total is spread across countries. The study finds that both mechanisms reduce the concentration of cobalt availability, redistributing effective access from a tiny cluster of production territories toward a much broader set of nations connected through investment ties and trade relationships. This reframing has immediate implications for how policymakers think about critical mineral security, because a country’s vulnerability to supply disruption depends less on whether cobalt is mined within its borders and more on the structure of the corporate and commercial networks in which it participates.

Technically, the dual-attribution approach required reconciling datasets that are rarely combined. Ownership attribution demands information on the corporate structure of mining and refining enterprises, including the ultimate parent companies behind joint ventures in producing countries, so that output can be assigned to the jurisdictions where controlling capital resides. Trade attribution, by contrast, relies on bilateral trade flows in cobalt-bearing commodities at multiple stages of processing, distinguishing ores and concentrates from unwrought intermediates and refined oxides and hydroxides. By computing both perspectives for every country and comparing them with the geographic-production and pre-trade baseline, the team could decompose the composite change in availability into a component driven by investment and a component driven by trade, exposing which channel dominates for each nation.

The results illuminate asymmetries that a single-lens analysis would hide. Countries that host mines but lack domestic ownership may show high geographic production while their ownership-attributed availability is far lower, with the difference flowing to the home countries of the investing firms. Conversely, countries with negligible mining but strong refining industries and dense import networks can accumulate substantial secondary availability through trade. The framework also captures intermediate cases, such as producing countries that have attracted foreign investment and simultaneously export processed goods, where primary and secondary attributions pull in different directions. Mapping these configurations across nearly two hundred economies turns an abstract debate about resource globalization into a concrete, country-by-country accounting.

For resource governance, the implications cut in several directions. Host countries, particularly in the developing world, may find that the cobalt extracted on their territory generates effective availability elsewhere, strengthening arguments for policies that link mining concessions to domestic processing, equity participation or export constraints. Exporting and investing countries, meanwhile, gain a quantitative basis for understanding how their corporate presence abroad translates into strategic material access, a consideration increasingly central to industrial strategies in the United States, the European Union, China and elsewhere. The authors emphasize that policies which account for both host-country and exporting-country perspectives are more likely to produce durable and equitable outcomes than measures designed from a single vantage point.

The study also arrives at a moment when cobalt demand trajectories are fiercely debated. Battery chemistries are shifting, with manufacturers reducing cobalt content in some cathode types while others, such as high-nickel formulations for long-range vehicles, remain cobalt-dependent. Recycling is expected to grow but cannot yet displace primary supply at scale. Against that backdrop, knowing who effectively holds cobalt availability, and through which channel, is essential input for scenario planning. A disruption in a producing region, a change in export policy, or a shift in ownership of a major mining asset propagates through the dual channels the framework describes, and the country-level sensitivity to each channel varies widely.

Methodologically, the dual-attribution framework is generalizable beyond cobalt. The same logic, attributing primary availability through corporate ownership and secondary availability through trade, could be applied to lithium, nickel, graphite, rare earth elements or any other critical mineral whose supply chains are globalized. As governments build critical mineral stockpiles, negotiate strategic partnerships and scrutinize foreign investment in mining sectors, tools of this kind offer a way to move beyond production statistics toward a genuinely structural understanding of resource access. The study’s central message is deceptively simple but far-reaching: in a globalized economy, the geography of what a country has and the geography of what a country can use are two different questions, and answering only the first one leaves policymakers flying blind on the second.

Subject of Research: How foreign direct investment and international trade redistribute country-level cobalt availability

Article Title: A dual-attribution framework reveals how foreign investment and trade redistribute cobalt availability

Article References: Liu, L., Zhang, L., Jiang, S., Li, Y., Li, R., Mei, Z., Yuan, Z., & Chen, J. (2026). A dual-attribution framework reveals how foreign investment and trade redistribute cobalt availability. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-78222-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-78222-4

Keywords: cobalt, foreign direct investment, international trade, critical minerals, supply chains, resource governance, battery materials, mineral availability, dual-attribution framework, Nature Communications, mining ownership, global concentration