Zijin, a new lithium company in China, hopes to make a lot of money from the demand for batteries.

The CEO of China’s Zijin Mining Group Co Ltd stated at the Reuters NEXT conference that lithium prices, which are currently at record highs, could fall by half by the end of 2025. However, the miner would still keep investing a lot in the sector.

The company is the top gold miner in China and one of the top copper producers. Over the past year, it has spent $16 billion buying three lithium mines, making it one of the top 10 lithium producers in the world. Even though there are a lot of deals going on, there are warnings that lithium prices, which are at record highs because of the rapid growth of electric vehicles, may peak next year because there will be too much supply.

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“By 2030, Zijin wants to be one of the three to five biggest mining companies in the world. “To do this, we need a new growth driver on top of our gold, copper, and zinc sectors,” said Zou Laichang, the head of the company.

“The best way for us to reach this goal is to use new energy and new materials.”

One of Zijin’s recent purchases was Canada’s Neo Lithium Corp., a company that mines lithium in Argentina. The deal, which closed in January, cost C$920 million ($690 million) and gave Zijin access to the Tres Quebradas (3Q) project.

It also bought the majority of shares in two lithium mines in China: the Lakkor Tso Lithium Salar mine in Tibet and the Xiangyuan lithium mine in Hunan province.

Zou said that the company plans to make more investments, but he didn’t say how much it plans to spend. Zijin is worth about $35 billion on the stock market, and it made a net profit of about $2.2 billion last year.

But there is a lot of competition for resources. Chinese battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL) and automakers BYD and Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) are also trying to get their hands on lithium.

Some companies are also trying to find other materials for batteries, which could reduce the need for lithium in the long run.

“Of course there are worries,” Zou said, “but we will make the most of our technology and low prices to stay competitive.”

He said, “We’ve been working on getting lithium from salt lake brine and hard-rock deposits to lower costs and increase the efficiency of our use rate.”

Zou said that an increase in supply by 2025 should bring prices down to a “normal range” of 300,000 to 400,000 yuan per tonne in the second half of that year.

That would cut China’s spot lithium carbonate battery grade prices by as much as half. According to Fastmarkets, these prices are a record 597,500 yuan ($83,430) per tonne, which is about three times what they were a year ago.

China makes up about 60% of the world’s supply of lithium chemicals, and its prices are used as an important benchmark around the world. Zijin recently told investors that it bought its mines based on the price of lithium carbonate being 100,000 yuan per tonne.

There are, however, more and more problems for Chinese miners who want to invest overseas. Canada told three Chinese companies last month that they couldn’t invest in lithium mines there because it was bad for national security.

Zou said, “We will be more careful, and we will pay more attention to assessing policy and political risks.”

Zijin is also in court with Australian miner AVZ Minerals Ltd. over the purchase of a 15% stake in the Manono project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is thought to be one of the largest lithium mines in the world.

A Nov. 15 investor briefing said that Zijin wants to be able to make 150,000 metric tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) by 2025.

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That’s about half of what the big Chinese company Ganfeng Lithium Co. Ltd. had planned.

Zijin is also growing its downstream business and beginning to make lithium iron phosphate (LFP). Zou said that by the end of this year, about 20,000 metric tonnes of LFP capacity would be put into use.

Click here to watch the Reuters Next conference live on Nov. 30 and Dec. 1.

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