We find and qualify lithium hydroxide monohydrate sources in China — technical and battery grade, coarse granular or micronized — and arrange the Class 8 dangerous-goods route to Korea through licensed partners.
Send us your grade, particle-size definition and destination. We come back with qualified sources, their COA format and a landed quote. → Request lithium hydroxide sources
A major Western producer's technical-grade datasheet for lithium hydroxide monohydrate commits to 56.5% LiOH minimum. So does every grade in China's national standard, GB/T 8766-2013. Line the Western document up against the loosest of that standard's four grades, and on three items it commits to less: a sodium-plus-potassium limit above what the standard allows at 0.05%, a sulfate limit above the standard's 0.030%, and an insolubles limit above both of the standard's two insolubles lines — 0.005% for hydrochloric-acid insolubles and 0.010% for water insolubles, which the sheet does not set separately. These are specification ceilings, not typical values — real Western material usually assays far better than its own sheet — so what the comparison measures is what two documents commit to, not what two materials contain. That is also the comparison a purchase order is written against.
The reason is not national quality. It is that 56.5% is a trade convention rather than a grade: all four grades in GB/T 8766 share the same main-content floor and differ only in impurities, so a purchase order reading "56.5% min, per GB/T 8766" has named no grade at all. And three lines on the Western sheet are written on a different chemical basis — Fe₂O₃ rather than Fe, CaO rather than Ca, CO₂ rather than carbonate — so a column-by-column read of the two documents is wrong before it starts.
Nami Tech Solutions (NTS) finds and qualifies lithium hydroxide monohydrate sources in China for buyers in Korea and beyond: technical grade for lithium grease and general chemical synthesis, and battery grade. We write the parts the standard leaves open into the order — the grade designation, the granulation definition, the certificate-of-analysis fields and the packaging — review the COA against the standard that was invoked, and arrange the Class 8 dangerous-goods route to Korea through licensed partners. This article sets out the rules we work to.
Disclaimer: This article is general practical information, not legal, customs or chemical-regulatory advice, and guarantees no classification, duty rate or regulatory determination for any shipment. Verify tariff classification and preferential origin with a licensed customs broker (관세사), Korean chemical obligations with the competent authority, and dangerous-goods packing with the carrier and the exporting country's inspection body. Status as of 4 November 2026: China's export-control suspension clock and Korea's chemical-regulation transition deadlines are both moving, and the 2026 Korean tariff schedule expires on 31 December 2026.
Where the Two Documents Differ, Converted Onto One Basis
Three lines on the Western technical-grade sheet have to be converted before they can be compared with the Chinese standard at all. The factors are stoichiometric, and the last one is the one that bites.
The carbonate conversion is the trap. A CO₂ figure that looks modest on a Western sheet can convert to a carbonate figure sitting close to the Chinese standard's loosest grade rather than its tightest, so a buyer who files the two sheets side by side and reads down the raw columns can reach the opposite conclusion from the true comparison.
With the conversions applied, the comparison against GB/T 8766's loosest grade (LiOH·H₂O-2) looks like this:
Two caveats belong on that table. The Western sheet's single acid-insolubles line does not name the acid, and set against either of the standard's two insolubles lines — hydrochloric-acid or water — it is the looser figure; acid-insoluble residue is in any case a subset of water-insoluble residue, so the sheet is looser on insolubles under either reading. And every number on both sides is a ceiling. The honest reading is commercial, not metallurgical: the common assumption that switching origin to China means accepting a looser document runs the wrong way on paper. What actually differs between the two is how each document is built, which items it chooses to bound, and on what basis it states them.
Four Grades, One Floor: What GB/T 8766-2013 Actually Specifies
GB/T 8766-2013, 单水氢氧化锂 (Lithium hydroxide monohydrate), was published on 27 September 2013 and took effect on 1 August 2014. It is current, it is held by the national non-ferrous metals standardisation committee, it replaced GB/T 8766-2002, and an official English version was published on 31 December 2021.
Clause 3.1 divides the product by chemical composition only into four grades: LiOH·H₂O-T1, LiOH·H₂O-T2, LiOH·H₂O-1 and LiOH·H₂O-2. There is no second classification system running alongside; the T-prefixed and bare-numbered designations are four rows of one table.
Mass fractions in %, transcribed from Table 1 of the standard. Impurity figures are maxima; the LiOH figure is a minimum.
Three features of that table change how an order should be written.
The floor is shared, so the number buyers quote is the one thing that distinguishes nothing. Every grade in the standard is 56.5% minimum. A specification that says "56.5% per GB/T 8766" has committed the supplier to the standard's main content and to none of its impurity grades, which is where the entire difference between T1 and -2 lives. Name the 牌号. The number is also the long-standing trade convention for this material — a now-discontinued technical/industrial-grade price assessment was titled around it — which is one more reason a bare "56.5%" specification names a market rather than a grade.
For grades -1 and -2 the sodium and potassium cells are merged. The standard sets only a combined Na+K limit — 0.02% and 0.05% respectively — and no individual limit for either element. T1 and T2 set them separately. A certificate of analysis for grade -1 that reports a single "Na+K" figure is therefore conforming to the standard, not evading it, and asking for a split on that grade is asking for something the standard does not require.
Nine impurity columns, and the ones buyers expect to see are not among them. Magnesium, copper and magnetic foreign matter appear nowhere in GB/T 8766. Magnetic foreign matter is a battery-grade item; so is a particle-size band. If your internal spec sheet carries Mg, Cu or a magnetics limit for an industrial grade, those lines came from somewhere other than this standard and need a contractual home of their own.
The physical specification is one sentence. Clause 3.3 requires white crystalline granules, free-flowing, with no inclusions visible to the eye, and clause 4.2 says appearance is checked by visual inspection. Chemical composition is determined per GB/T 11064, the analysis-method standard for lithium carbonate, lithium hydroxide monohydrate and lithium chloride, with water insolubles per the standard's own Annex A.
One note for anyone still working from a pre-2014 sheet. The 2013 revision added brine as a permitted feedstock, lowered Na+K for grades -1 and -2, lowered both insolubles lines, changed the permitted bag weight, and raised — that is, loosened — the chloride limit. An old spec sheet is therefore tighter on chloride and looser on alkali metals than the standard in force, which is the opposite of the direction most people assume a revision moves.
What the Standard Leaves Out: Particle Size
GB/T 8766-2013 contains no particle-size clause. Not in the composition table, not in the appearance clause, and not in the per-lot inspection items, which Table 2 of the standard limits to chemical composition and appearance. A granule requirement cannot be inherited from the standard because the standard never had one.
Clause 7 of the standard lists what the contract should state: product name, grade, net weight and number of packages, packaging requirements, delivery date, the number of the standard, the contract number, and other. Granulation can only enter through those last two headings. Which gives the structural rule for this item:
If the granule requirement is not written into the contract, it does not exist — and no reference to GB/T 8766 will create it.
That matters because a figure now circulating widely does look like an industrial granule specification, and is not one. The Guangzhou Futures Exchange published a consultation draft for lithium hydroxide futures and options on 8 October 2026, and its proposed deliverable quality includes a D50 of 200–700 µm. Three labels have to travel with that number:
- it is battery grade, benchmarked to GB/T 26008-2020 grade D1 (the battery-grade monohydrate standard, in force since 1 May 2021), not to GB/T 8766;
- it is proposed — published for comment on 8 October 2026, with the comment period closed on 13 October 2026, and not in force; and
- it is a futures delivery term, which is a market's standardisation of a traded lot, not a process requirement.
Proposed terms only, and five rows of a longer table. Figures as cited in a Chinese futures research institute's lithium hydroxide whitepaper of 26 October 2026; we did not obtain the exchange's own rule text.
Lined up against the industrial table above, that is a different document doing a different job — eleven impurity lines against nine, magnetics in parts per billion, and a two-sided main-content range where the industrial standard sets only a floor.
For the other reference point, Western technical-grade datasheets typically give a grain size among physical properties such as bulk density and melting point, not among the specified limits. A typical value in a properties block is not a guarantee, and a supplier is not in breach of it.
Grease Is Where the Industrial Grade Goes, and Why the Assay Is a Dosing Input
Battery grade goes into cathode material. Industrial grade goes into lithium-based lubricating greases and into other lithium compounds, and the industrial buyer, according to a Chinese futures research institute's market whitepaper, cares about main alkali content and basic impurities reaching specification and is not demanding about particle morphology or magnetic foreign matter. Battery-grade supply, by contrast, is customised: particle-size distribution tailored to the customer's line, qualified through long sample-firing campaigns and batch-consistency audits. That is the real industrial/battery split — not a purity ladder but two different procurement processes.
The grease chemistry is worth one paragraph. Lithium 12-hydroxystearate is the most common soap thickener in lubricating grease, and lithium hydroxide saponifies the acid in base oil to build the fibrous soap network that holds the oil.
What follows for the purchase order:
- The lithium hydroxide is consumed stoichiometrically against the acid. The assay is therefore a dosing input, not only a purity claim.
- Carbonate is dead weight. It does not saponify.
- Granulation drives the dissolution and dispersion rate into the hot oil-and-acid charge, which is why a grease plant cares about granule size even though the standard is silent on it. This one is our reading of the chemistry rather than a sourced statement; treat it as the reason to write the granule clause, not as a published requirement.
- Insolubles are abrasive carry-through into a finished lubricant — and the insolubles lines are exactly where the Western technical document is loosest.
Reading the COA
Clause 6.5 of GB/T 8766 specifies what the quality certificate must carry, and the list is more useful than most buyers realise because it names things that can be asked for by name:
That is the clean test for the question every buyer of Chinese chemicals eventually asks — whether the certificate in hand is the producer's or a trader's retype. The standard requires the producer's inspection-department seal and an inspection date; a document carrying neither is not the certificate the standard describes. We know what the standard requires here. We do not know how consistently Chinese producers issue a GB/T 8766 grade designation in practice rather than a bare "56.5%", and we are not characterising practice we have not measured. Ask for the grade designation explicitly, and ask who filled the bag — the manufacturer-versus-trader questions in our supplier due diligence checklist apply unchanged. What a first lot has to demonstrate is in our sample evaluation protocol.
Then two numeric checks that need no laboratory.
An assay above about 57.1% is not better material. The monohydrate's molar mass is 41.96 g/mol, of which LiOH is 57.07% and water of crystallisation is 42.93% (lithium itself is 16.54%). 57.07% is a stoichiometric ceiling, not a quality target. Because the assay is an acidimetric titration of total alkali, a result meaningfully above it indicates that part of the water of crystallisation has already been lost and some anhydrous lithium hydroxide is present — which is why the proposed exchange band is two-sided at 56.8–57.8% while GB/T 8766 sets only a lower bound. A Chinese industrial COA reading 58% conforms to the standard and is, on the face of it, partly dehydrated. For a grease maker dosing by mass against a saponification stoichiometry that assumes the monohydrate, that is a formulation error rather than a paperwork one. Carbonate titrates to some degree as well, so read the inference as directional unless the certificate separates the determinations.
The carbonate line measures how much of the product has already reacted with air. The reaction is
2 LiOH·H₂O + CO₂ → Li₂CO₃ + 3 H₂O
so a carbonate figure converts to lithium carbonate by × 1.2313: grade T1's 0.50% CO₃²⁻ is about 0.62% as Li₂CO₃, and grade -2's 0.70% is about 0.86%. Carbonate is the one impurity on the table that is a function of handling and age rather than of the plant that made it.
Storage: Six Months, or Indefinitely
Three bodies with nothing to do with each other have arrived at the same physical fact from three directions. GB/T 8766-2013 clause 6.4 gives a calendar rule for ordinary warehousing — store dry and free of acidic corrosive atmosphere, with storage not to exceed half a year. A Western producer's technical-grade datasheet states the condition under which that calendar stops applying: once carbon dioxide and humidity are excluded, storage is effectively indefinite. The proposed exchange rules, draft of 8 October 2026, set a much shorter freshness window than either, requiring a warehouse-warrant registration application within 60 days of the production date.
An exchange independently landing on 60 days against the standard's six months is clear third-party evidence that this material ages in storage — and the industry account is the same: because the monohydrate absorbs moisture and cakes, inventory turnover across the chain is short.
Practically: treat the production date as a specification field, not a logistics detail, and ask for it on the certificate alongside the inspection date. A lot that has spent its storage life in a trader's warehouse can arrive with a higher carbonate figure than the one on the COA, and the COA is not wrong — it was true on its inspection date.
Claims Run Three Months From Receipt
The inspection rules in clause 5 of GB/T 8766 are the part with real commercial teeth, because they are the default claim terms written into the national standard a Chinese contract will invoke.
- Clause 5.1.1 — the supplier's own quality-supervision department inspects, guarantees conformity to the standard or to the order contract, and fills out the quality certificate. The standard itself assigns inspection to the supplier and names no third party.
- Clause 5.1.2 — the claim window. The buyer must inspect on receipt and, where results do not conform to the standard or the contract, raise it with the supplier within three months of the date the goods were received. Resolution is by negotiation between the parties; if arbitration is needed, arbitration sampling is carried out jointly at the buyer's premises. The clock runs from receipt, not from production or shipment — which for a sea shipment from China to Korea is the more favourable of the two, and for a lot that sat in a bonded warehouse is less so than it looks.
- Clause 5.2 — a lot is one blended batch, with a net weight of not more than 20 tonnes.
- Clauses 5.3 and 5.4 — composition and appearance are inspected on every lot, sampled at two-thirds of the depth of the bag. The method is a stainless-steel or rigid-PVC sampling tube inserted down the centre of the bag; increments are blended and quartered down to about 200 g, with sampling quantity per GB/T 6678-2003.
- Clause 5.5 — on a failure, double the sample and retest the failing item; a second failure rejects the lot.
Two things to do with that. Put the three-month window into your incoming-inspection schedule, and check it against how long your own plant actually takes to analyse an incoming bulk raw material — if a lot can sit for a quarter before anyone titrates it, the window closes before the problem is found. And note that the sampling method is specified: a claim defended with a sample taken from the top of an opened bag is weaker than one taken per clause 5.4. How a claim is built and presented is the subject of our quality claim handling guide.
Shipping: UN 2680, and P002 Rather Than P001
The transport classification is uniform across frameworks. UN 2680, LITHIUM HYDROXIDE, Class 8, packing group II, label 8 — identical under ADR, RID and IMDG on the producer datasheets we hold, with IATA packing instructions 863 for cargo aircraft and 859 for passenger aircraft.
The packing instruction is the detail most easily got wrong by analogy. Lithium hydroxide is a solid, so the packing instruction is P002 with IBC08 — not P001, which covers liquids and is the code that applies to the corrosive liquids more commonly discussed in this trade. From dangerous-goods reference databases, consistent across two: limited quantity 1 kg, excepted quantity E2, portable tank instruction T3 with special provision TP33, stowage category A, segregation groups SGG18 and SG35.
On the Chinese side the standard itself reaches into the dangerous-goods regime. Clause 6.1 requires the bag to carry the GB 190 「腐蚀性物品」 corrosive mark together with the GB/T 191 「怕湿」 keep-dry mark, alongside the product name, the standard applied, the main content, the batch number, net and gross weight, and the supplier's name. Clause 6.2 specifies an inner plastic liner bag inside an outer woven plastic bag at a net 20 kg to 1,000 kg per bag — a range, not a unit, so the bag size is something the contract fixes.
The export packing certification (危包证) chain is the same two-document structure we set out for a corrosive liquid, and it is worth reading there rather than restating here: the container manufacturer holds the performance certificate and the dangerous-goods producer or exporter holds the use appraisal, their validity windows have to overlap, and repacking at a trader moves both documents onto the repacker's containers. Our triflic acid overview sets out that split, and Part 2 of the shipping series covers forwarder selection in China and the port-to-storage gates in Korea. Two differences apply here and must not be lost in the carry-over: the packaging is a solid configuration — lined woven bags with UN-certified outer packaging, not drums for a liquid — and we did not re-verify the certification procedure for a solid in this research, so take the mechanics from that article and confirm the configuration with the inspection body rather than assuming it transfers.
China's Export Side: Not Listed, With Two Caveats
Lithium hydroxide is not a Chinese export-controlled item. That conclusion rests on two primary documents rather than on the absence of news.
Announcement No. 58 of 2025 (Ministry of Commerce and General Administration of Customs, issued 9 October 2025, effective 8 November 2025) imposed export controls on lithium-battery and graphite-anode items. It has no annex — the controlled list is the body of the announcement — and the list covers three groups: rechargeable lithium-ion cells and packs at or above 300 Wh/kg with their manufacturing equipment and technology; cathode materials, namely high-density lithium iron phosphate, nickel-cobalt-manganese and nickel-cobalt-aluminium hydroxide precursors, and lithium-rich manganese-based cathode, with their equipment; and artificial graphite anode material, blends, and granulation, graphitisation and coating equipment. Neither lithium hydroxide nor lithium carbonate appears anywhere in it.
That second group is where a reader goes wrong. The announcement does control "hydroxides" — but nickel-cobalt-manganese and nickel-cobalt-aluminium hydroxides, which are ternary cathode precursors. They are not lithium hydroxide, and a keyword search that stops at the word will produce the wrong answer.
The 2026 dual-use licensing catalogue (Announcement No. 91 of 2025, issued 31 December 2025, in force 1 January 2026) gives the better answer because it is the positive list rather than one announcement. In 168 pages, 氢氧化锂 occurs exactly once: at item 1B233.b.4, as evaporators for concentrating lithium hydroxide solution, within the controls on lithium isotope separation plant. The only lithium material entry is 1C233, lithium enriched in lithium-6 above natural abundance. HS 2825.20 does not appear in the catalogue at all. Ordinary lithium hydroxide monohydrate at natural isotopic abundance is not a licensable dual-use item; the word is in the catalogue because of a non-proliferation control on isotope enrichment.
Two hedges come from the catalogue's own explanatory notes and should be respected rather than argued with. A licence is required for a listed item whether or not an HS code is printed against it, so "my HS code is not in the catalogue" is not by itself an answer. And where the catalogue conflicts with the laws, the regulations, the dual-use export control list or subsequent announcements, those prevail — the catalogue is a convenience document, not the control instrument.
On the suspension clock, here is what is published and what is not. As of 4 November 2026 the only published instrument is Announcement No. 70 of 2025 (7 November 2025, in force), which suspends Announcements 55, 56, 57 and 58 of 2025 and Announcements 61 and 62 until 10 November 2026. Press reporting of a two-month extension of the wider US–China arrangement to 10 January 2027 exists; we did not find a Ministry of Commerce announcement implementing it for these export-control suspensions, and we do not treat it as settled. For lithium hydroxide the question is in any case indirect: the item is not on No. 58's list and not in the 2026 dual-use catalogue, so whether No. 58 resumes on 10 November does not by itself change what an exporter of this material needs.
One clause of Announcement No. 58 does reach an uncontrolled shipment, and it is rarely quoted. Goods that are not controlled but whose parameters, indicators or performance are close to a controlled item must be annotated 「不属于管制物项」 ("not a controlled item") in the remarks field of the customs declaration, with the specific parameters stated; where customs doubts that the entry is complete, accurate or truthful it will query it, and the goods are not released while the query is open. For lithium hydroxide that is a tail risk rather than a routine one. It is also a concrete reason the specification sheet and the declaration should agree before the container is booked.
Korea: Two Ten-Digit Lines, and a Quota a Grease Buyer Cannot Use
Heading 2825.20 is not one line in Korea. It splits, and the split costs money.
2026 schedule, valid 1 January to 31 December 2026.
Three readings follow. Declaring the monohydrate under the oxide subheading attracts the 8% basic rate instead of 5%, so the ten-digit line is worth confirming rather than inheriting from a previous shipment. With a valid Korea–China certificate of origin the rate is 0% either way, which means the practical exposure is the origin certificate, not the duty rate — without it, 5%. And the figures above are the 2026 schedule; the dataset expires on 31 December 2026 and the next annual refresh follows in January, so a shipment landing in 2027 is priced against a table nobody has read yet.
Now the quota rate, which is the counter-intuitive part. A 0% 할당관세 (quota tariff) for 수산화리튬 does exist for 2026. It appears in the government's quota-tariff list under the 신성장 (new-growth) category at 0% against a 5% basic rate, and the operative notice — Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources (산업통상부) Announcement No. 2026-001 of 2 January 2026, issued under Article 92(3) of the Enforcement Decree of the Customs Act — carries the row in its Annex 3, covering the full calendar year:
2825 20 산화리튬과 수산화리튬 → 2. 수산화리튬 → 이차전지 제조용 → 0 → 수입전량
The 0% is conditioned on end use: 「이차전지 제조용」, for secondary-battery manufacture. Material imported for lithium grease, for general chemical synthesis or for resale is outside the condition. Lithium carbonate sits in the same annex on the same terms. The natural assumption — "lithium hydroxide gets 0% in Korea now" — is true for battery makers and false for everyone else.
What rescues the industrial buyer is the previous table: the Korea–China FTA line is already 0%. So the practical position is that the quota rate is for battery users, Chinese-origin material reaches 0% for everyone else through the FTA, and the thing to protect is the certificate of origin. Without either, 5%.
If you are a battery-use importer who does need the quota route, the same notice sets a recommendation procedure with a 20-day certificate validity and extension window, and eligibility may be narrowed by past supply purpose, import record, facility scale or production plan. One thing we could not establish: the lithium rows name no recommending agency and set the limit quantity as 수입전량 (the entire import), and the customs tariff dataset separately flags 2825.20.2000 as carrying an end-use rate. That pattern reads like an end-use rate applied at declaration rather than an allocated quota, but we did not confirm the administering mechanism and are not asserting it. Settle it with a licensed customs broker before pricing it in.
The Korean Designation a CAS Search Will Miss
This is the part of the Korean file most likely to be got wrong, and it is wrong in the direction of concluding there is nothing to do.
Lithium hydroxide is a newly designated 인체급성유해성물질 — an acutely human-hazardous substance — under the designation notice of the National Institute of Chemical Safety (화학물질안전원고시 제2025-19호, in force 7 August 2025). The entry in the quantity regulation (화학물질안전원고시 제2025-12호, Annex 2) reads:
CAS 1310-66-3, the monohydrate, does not appear in that annex. We searched the whole list; there are no hits. The monohydrate is nonetheless caught, because Article 3 of the designation notice brings in the listed substances including their hydrates, and treats a mixture composed solely of listed substances as a listed substance itself. So a buyer who looks up the CAS number printed on the bag of monohydrate, finds nothing in the annex, and concludes the material is unregulated has reached the wrong answer by a reasonable method. Search the anhydrous CAS number, then read the hydrate clause.
Two corroborating details. The 40 t / 500 t pair is the tier row for skin corrosion category 1B/1C, so the designation is driven by skin corrosivity — the same property that puts the material in UN Class 8, which is a useful consistency check between the chemical file and the transport file. And lithium hydroxide is not in Annex 3, so it is not an accident-preparedness substance (사고대비물질) — the same finding we reached for triflic acid.
The transition schedule is the live part, and some of it has already expired. The notice took effect on 7 August 2025, but for newly designated substances — including those whose content threshold was lowered — it took effect on 1 January 2026. The unique number is itself the marker: 2025-1-1249 is a new designation, where carried-over substances keep their older prefixes. Article 3(2) of the supplementary provisions then gives a person already handling the substance before 1 January 2026 these deadlines:
The schedule only protects an incumbent. It runs to a person who was already handling the substance before 1 January 2026. A buyer starting imports now gets no transition at all — the import declaration and the rest apply from the first shipment. That asymmetry is the single most consequential line in this section for a new entrant.
Two things we did not establish and are therefore not stating. We did not obtain a K-REACH existing-substance number from a primary source, so none is printed here, and whether lithium hydroxide is a 등록대상기존화학물질 carrying a tonnage-band registration duty is a question to put to the competent authority rather than to this article. And we did not confirm whether the Chemicals Control Act import declaration is a 세관장확인 item attached to HSK 2825.20.2000 under the integrated public notice (통합공고); confirm that before the first shipment rather than assuming either way. The import declaration is filed in the importer's own name, so who the importer of record will be, and whether they can make the filing, is a decision for before the order.
There Is No Published Price for This Grade
An industrial-grade buyer negotiates without a reference. A major price reporting agency discontinued its Chinese technical and industrial-grade lithium hydroxide assessment on 31 October 2024, citing a lack of liquidity and of production of the commodity. Nothing has replaced it in public. The consequence is concrete, and our reading of it is this: with no assessment of its own, an industrial quotation has little to anchor to except the battery-grade price plus a differential, and the buyer has no third-party number against which to check either the anchor or the differential. We hold no price view on this material and publish none; the sources we found conflict, and the figures that surface in search are marketplace listings rather than assessments.
The supply background behind that thinness, from the same Chinese research institute's whitepaper, is worth one paragraph and no more. National monthly capacity in August 2026 was about 69,300 t — roughly 51,000 t of ore-and-brine smelting plus 18,300 t of causticisation from lithium carbonate — against output of about 34,000 t, which is a blended utilisation of about 49%, with the causticisation route running near a quarter of its capacity. And the direction of trade has reversed: Chinese exports rose from 27,300 t in 2018 to 130,000 t in 2023 and then fell to 53,900 t in 2025, while imports grew to 18,400 t, and over January to August 2026 imports of 45,100 t exceeded exports of 33,900 t — China was a net importer of lithium hydroxide over that period. For an industrial buyer the reading we would take from that is narrow: installed capacity at twice current output says nothing about how much of it will meet a named grade with a defined granulation and issue a sealed certificate against it. Capacity is not the scarce thing here.
Before the First Order
- Name the grade, not the number. Write LiOH·H₂O-T1, -T2, -1 or -2 into the purchase order. "56.5% per GB/T 8766" specifies no grade, and on grades -1 and -2 expect a combined Na+K figure, because that is all the standard requires.
- Write the clauses the standard omits. Particle size, magnesium, copper and magnetic foreign matter are all absent from GB/T 8766, so they exist only if your contract creates them. Define granulation the way your process uses it — a sieve-cut range or a D50 with a method — under packaging requirements or other terms; the 200–700 µm figure in circulation is a proposed battery-grade exchange delivery term.
- Ask for the certificate the standard describes — grade designation, batch number, each result with the inspection department's seal, and the inspection date — plus the production date, and ask who filled the bag.
- Read the assay as stoichiometry. 57.07% is the monohydrate's ceiling. A figure meaningfully above it suggests partial dehydration, the standard bounds the assay only from below, and a grease dosing by mass will feel the difference.
- Treat the production date as a shelf-life field. Six months in the standard, indefinite only with carbon dioxide and humidity excluded, 60 days in the exchange draft. Carbonate is the line that moves.
- Diarise the claim window. Non-conformity must be raised within three months of receipt, and the standard's sampling method — two-thirds bag depth, quartered to about 200 g — is what an arbitration sample looks like.
- Get the shipping codes right. UN 2680, Class 8, PG II, P002 for a solid, and the GB 190 corrosive and GB/T 191 keep-dry marks on the bag by the standard's own requirement.
- Settle the ten-digit line and the origin certificate before pricing. 2825.20.2000 at 5% basic, 0% under the Korea–China FTA, against 8% basic on the oxide line; the quota 0% is restricted to secondary-battery manufacture.
- Decide the importer of record and start the chemical file early. 인체급성유해성물질, unique number 2025-1-1249, 10% content threshold; the monohydrate CAS number is absent from the annex but caught by the hydrate clause; and a first-time importer gets no transition period.
What This Page Does Not Say
Some of what makes this work is specific enough that we answer it directly rather than in public: which producers hold which grades and granulations and which of them will issue a sealed, dated certificate against a named 牌号; current price levels and the differential between industrial and battery grade; lead times, bag configurations and sea routes to Korean ports; and which grades and granule definitions have passed which buyers' processes. None of it is in the public record in a form we are willing to print. This is also how we handle a less-traded specialty metal compound generally — the pattern is on our specialty metal compounds page: send the exact compound, the purity and form you need and the end use, and we confirm the item, determine its export-control status and come back on sourcing after that.
Buying lithium hydroxide outside the battery chain, where the standard stops short of what your process needs? NTS finds and qualifies lithium hydroxide monohydrate sources in China — technical and battery grade, coarse granular or micronized — writes the grade designation, the granulation definition and the COA fields into the order, reviews the certificate against the standard that was invoked, and arranges the Class 8 dangerous-goods route to Korea through licensed partners. If you already have a supplier, we can review the specification and the COA alone, or just arrange the route through licensed partners. Write to [email protected] or use the inquiry form with your grade, your particle-size definition, the monthly quantity, the destination and the end use — that last one because the Korean quota rate and the chemical filings both turn on it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is "56.5% LiOH min, GB/T 8766" a complete specification?
No. All four grades in GB/T 8766-2013 — LiOH·H₂O-T1, -T2, -1 and -2 — share the same 56.5% minimum and differ only in impurity limits, so that wording commits the supplier to the main content and to none of the impurity grades. Name the 牌号 (grade designation), and expect a combined Na+K figure rather than separate values on grades -1 and -2, because that is what the standard sets for those two.
Does the Chinese industrial standard cover particle size?
No. GB/T 8766-2013 has no particle-size clause, and its per-lot inspection items are chemical composition and appearance only. Granulation can enter only through the packaging-requirements or other-terms headings of the contract. The 200–700 µm D50 figure now circulating comes from the Guangzhou Futures Exchange's proposed delivery specification for battery-grade material, published as a consultation draft on 8 October 2026 and benchmarked to GB/T 26008-2020 grade D1 — not from the industrial standard.
Does lithium hydroxide need a Chinese export licence?
Not as a listed item. It does not appear in Announcement No. 58 of 2025, whose controlled hydroxides are nickel-cobalt-manganese and nickel-cobalt-aluminium cathode precursors, and in the 2026 dual-use licensing catalogue the term appears only as evaporators within lithium isotope-separation plant, with HS 2825.20 absent altogether. Two caveats stand: the catalogue requires a licence for a listed item whether or not an HS code is printed, and the laws and the control list prevail over the catalogue. As of 4 November 2026 the only published suspension instrument, Announcement No. 70, runs to 10 November 2026; reporting of an extension of the wider arrangement to 10 January 2027 exists but we found no ministry announcement implementing it for these suspensions, and because this item is not listed either way, the date does not by itself change what an exporter needs.
Our CAS number is 1310-66-3 and it is not in the Korean annex. Is the monohydrate unregulated?
No. The annex lists lithium hydroxide at CAS 1310-65-2, unique number 2025-1-1249, as an 인체급성유해성물질 with a 10% content threshold, and Article 3 of the designation notice brings in listed substances including their hydrates. The monohydrate is caught through that clause rather than through its own CAS entry, which is why a search on 1310-66-3 returns nothing and still does not mean what it appears to mean.
Can we import at the 0% quota tariff?
Only for secondary-battery manufacture. The 2026 quota rate for 수산화리튬 is conditioned on 「이차전지 제조용」 end use, so grease, general synthesis and resale fall outside it. Chinese-origin material reaches 0% anyway under the Korea–China FTA on HSK 2825.20.2000, against a 5% basic rate — so for a non-battery buyer the thing to protect is the certificate of origin, not the quota. The 2026 schedule expires on 31 December 2026.
Why would a COA reading 58% LiOH be a problem?
Because 57.07% is the monohydrate's stoichiometric LiOH content, the rest being 42.93% water of crystallisation. The assay is an acidimetric titration of total alkali and GB/T 8766 bounds it only from below, so a result meaningfully above 57.07% conforms to the standard while indicating that some water of crystallisation has been lost and some anhydrous material is present. A grease maker dosing by mass against a monohydrate stoichiometry under-doses the hydroxide as a result. Carbonate also titrates, so treat the inference as directional unless the certificate separates the determinations.
What is the claim window on a Chinese lot?
Three months from receipt, under clause 5.1.2 of GB/T 8766-2013: the buyer inspects the goods received and, on non-conformity with the standard or the contract, raises it with the supplier within three months of the date of receipt, for resolution by negotiation, with arbitration sampling carried out jointly at the buyer's premises.
References (Public Sources)
Held in full and read directly: Chinese national standard GB/T 8766-2013 单水氢氧化锂, in force, obtained through the national standards full-text system and read in its entirety, including Table 1, the inspection rules of clause 5, the marking and packaging provisions of clause 6 and the contract-content list of clause 7; Announcement No. 58 of 2025 of the Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs (9 October 2025) and Announcement No. 70 of 2025 (7 November 2025), both complete texts; the 2026 dual-use items and technologies import and export licensing catalogue issued by Announcement No. 91 of 2025 (31 December 2025), 168 pages, searched in full; Korea's 화학물질안전원고시 제2025-19호 designation notice with its supplementary provisions, and 제2025-12호 「유해화학물질의 규정수량에 관한 규정」 with Annexes 2 and 3; Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources Announcement No. 2026-001 (2 January 2026) on quota-tariff recommendation procedure, with its annexes; Korea Customs Service tariff-rate and HS-code datasets for the 2026 calendar year, and the government quota-tariff list; two technical-grade product datasheets issued in 2018 by a major Western lithium producer; and a major price reporting agency's notice discontinuing its Chinese technical and industrial-grade lithium hydroxide assessment on 31 October 2024.
Read partially or through secondary sources: GB/T 26008-2020 电池级单水氢氧化锂 — registry metadata only (in force 1 May 2021, grades D1 to D3); its grade table is not reproduced here because we did not obtain the text. A Chinese futures research institute's lithium hydroxide whitepaper of 26 October 2026, which is the route by which the proposed exchange contract terms, the capacity and output figures, the trade balance and the industrial-versus-battery market description reach this article; the exchange's own consultation draft of 8 October 2026 we did not obtain. IMDG packing, limited-quantity and segregation codes beyond class, packing group and label, from two independent dangerous-goods reference databases, cross-checked against the producer datasheets. The saponification chemistry of lithium 12-hydroxystearate, from patent and academic summaries. Press reporting of 24 September 2026 on a two-month extension of the wider US–China trade arrangement, which we do not treat as settled for the export-control suspensions.
Prices, producer and supplier names, lead times, routes and our buyers' grades are absent above because the public record does not carry them in a form we were willing to print, or because they are ours to disclose on request rather than in public.
