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IGO mines and sells battery metals — mainly lithium and nickel — to global markets.
IGO is an Australian mining company that digs up the metals that go into electric car batteries and clean energy systems. Its two big products are lithium, the key ingredient in most rechargeable batteries, and nickel, which helps batteries store more energy and last longer. It also produces copper and cobalt as by-products. The company sells these raw materials to customers around the world, mostly in Asia, where the battery and stainless steel factories are.
The heart of the business today is lithium. IGO owns a big stake in the Greenbushes mine in Western Australia — the world's largest and lowest-cost hard rock lithium mine — through a joint venture with Albemarle and Tianqi. Greenbushes is the crown jewel: its ore is unusually rich, so it costs less to produce a tonne of lithium concentrate than almost anywhere else. IGO also runs a lithium hydroxide plant nearby with Albemarle, turning mined concentrate into a refined chemical that battery makers can use directly. On the nickel side, IGO operates the Nova mine and holds a share of the Forrestania operation, both in Western Australia. Why do customers buy from IGO rather than someone else? Mostly because of cost and quality. Greenbushes spits out high-grade concentrate cheaply, and buyers — battery chemical makers, cathode producers, and eventually car companies — want reliable supply from a low-cost, stable jurisdiction like Australia. That low cost matters enormously when lithium prices swing, which they do violently. The company has ridden the boom-and-bust of lithium prices hard: profits soared when prices spiked in 2022 and then fell sharply as prices crashed in 2023 and 2024.
IGO has been reshaping itself to focus on battery minerals. It sold its gold assets, including the Tropicana mine, to sharpen its identity as a clean-energy metals producer. It has also poured money into downstream processing — the hydroxide plant — a bet that has proven costly and slow to ramp up, a reminder that mining is one thing and chemical refining is another. The company pays a dividend when cash allows, and its fortunes rise and fall with battery metal prices and the pace of the global shift to electric vehicles. It is, in short, a bet on the electrification of everything — profitable when the world is hungry for batteries, painful when it isn't.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026