Who Is the ‘Big Shot’ Behind Nickel’s Bad Short?

Even the roller-coaster world of commodities trading has rarely seen anything like nickel’s spectacular blow-out. The metal that ends up in goods from kitchen appliances to electric-vehicle batteries rocketed 250% in just two days, prompting a trading halt in London March 8 and leaving a short-squeezed Chinese tycoon, Xiang Guangda, facing potential losses in the billions of dollars. The founder of Tsingshan Holding Group Co. is suddenly famous well beyond the niche metal he’s come to dominate. He is nickel’s big short, and now he has to decide whether and how to unwind a bet that’s gone terribly wrong.

In Chinese commodities circles, Xiang is known as “Big Shot” because of Tsingshan’s unrivaled clout in nickel production and trading. Like many modern Chinese tycoons, his roots are in hard-scrabble entrepreneurship: in his case, a late-1980s business making frames for car windows. He started trading stainless steel in the early 1990s -- that grew quickly as China urbanized rapidly. After turning to producing stainless steel, Xiang took on a singular mission: making the metal as cheap as possible to produce. Through a series of technological innovations, he upended how and where the raw material -- nickel -- gets made. About a decade ago, he made major investments in Indonesia, turning Tsingshan into the world’s top nickel producer. That, together with a penchant for big bets, means his decisions regularly rattle markets. He helped drive prices sharply higher in 2019 by snapping up inventories, and triggered a brief tumble in early 2021 after unveiling a cheaper way to produce nickel for high-performance EV batteries.