Collusion is kind of a strong statement. There is a fair bit of competition, its not only China and only Japan, and in these places its not one company. There a

Collusion is kind of a strong statement. There is a fair bit of competition, its not only China and only Japan, and in these places its not one company. There are cathode companies in Korea as well. There are also multiple cell manufactures in multiple countries. Tesla on battery day gave a pretty good exploitation of why the price is what it is, and they didn't say 'we need to solve this by trust busting'. Elon Musk basically said 'if you attach a GPS tracker to a nickel atom its journey would be crazy'. Many, many steps are involved. Many processes, that then need to be reprocessed, and reprocessed again, and reprocessed again with a lot of shipping in between. The problem is the industry was to small so far to really consolidate all these steps, localize production and mining. Rather many chemicals need are just bought in the form they were available from other industries, and then processed were built on top of that. This video is a pretty nice visualization of the current process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i1T6s_NdAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i1T6s_NdAQ