Camec, the London-listed junior miner, last week mothballed its Mukondo mine, one of the world's richest cobalt mines, saying it might resume production in early 2009 if prices recover. “It is almost as is there is a buyers' strike,” said Andrew Groves, chief executive of Camec, referring to Chinese buyers who were buying record quantities of the metal six months ago and sending it to China's factories to be processed into batteries, propeller blades, magnets and chemicals, among a range of applications so varied that cobalt demand can be seen as a rough proxy of industrial activity.

Economists are scrutinising China's downturn to gauge the extent of a possible global recession but official statistics do not yet paint a clear picture. The cobalt market's collapse offers one indication. The market has two poles – Congo and China. Cobalt is mostly mined in Congo's Katanga province and 64 per cent was processed in China in 2007.

The freezing effect of the end market on the source market was further confirmed last week when Katanga Mining, a copper- cobalt miner in Congo, suspended its cobalt operations. Like Camec, it will meet reduced demand by selling from current stocks.