Uranium Spot Market Update

July 1, 2025 | (26 mins 50 secs)

Per Jander of WMC joins Jimmy Connor of Bloor Street Capital and provides a nuanced look at the uranium market's opportunities and challenges. He discusses tariffs and the cautious dance of utilities and explores what may support higher uranium prices. 

Watch more Bloor Street Capital videos on Youtube.com/@BloorStreetCapital.

Video Transcript

James Connor: Thank you very much for joining us today. How are things in Monaco? You're in a different city or country whenever I speak to you. In the past month, you were in Australia, China, Japan, and now you're in Monaco.

Per Jander: Yes, my suitcase sees a lot of miles every year. I'll probably need to buy a new one every year because there's some wear and tear. But no, I like traveling. But I look forward to spending significant time in Sweden with my mother for the remainder of the summer. That should be quite fun.

James Connor: A lot of your travels involve uranium, and this is where I want to focus our discussion today. But before we do that, just for the benefit of viewers who might not know you or your firm, WMC, maybe you can give a brief overview of WMC and what exactly they do.

Per Jander: WMC is a Dutch commodities merchant. Three Dutch gentlemen started it in 2016 with nuclear fuel. Then, in 2019, another ex-Cameco colleague and I joined. We've been quite busy since. A couple of years later, we expanded into battery materials, too. We trade uranium and nuclear fuel today and do lithium, cobalt, manganese, copper, and nickel. Anything energy transition-related is where we want to focus.

We've grown quite a bit. We're about 40 people, and we have interns now. When I stop by the Amsterdam office, a lot is going on. Also, we have some recent hires on the nuclear fuel side that we're very happy with over in the U.S. Things are going well. It's exciting times.

James Connor: That's great. Why don't we move on now and focus on uranium? This is where you spend all your time, specifically in the spot market. How would you characterize the activity in the uranium spot market year to date?

Per Jander: I would say up until very recently, it was almost like a sleeping pill. There was not much going on. There has been so much uncertainty, especially for U.S. utility companies (utilities), when there were talks of Russian sanctions. Then there would be sanctions, and this was the previous government.

Now there are going to be sanctions, but there's going to be a waiver process. We don't know what that looks like. Then the Russians retaliate with their own ban, and they have a waiver process, which people have no insight into how that will work out. Finally, it seems like the kinks get worked out, and then we got a new U.S. government, and then I guess the keyword so far this year is tariffs. That created an additional and rather large layer of uncertainty for utilities. They've been really on the sidelines for a long time.

When there's no real-term or utility activity, it's hard for the spot market to find direction, especially when you don't have really engaged investors. They're also on the sidelines. They don't know what will happen with the financial markets overall, not just uranium, but the global economy.

People have been holding their breath, and they're probably starting to turn blue around now. We're just waiting for some clarity. But now there are all sorts of geopolitical issues that might be spreading from not just Russia and Ukraine; it looks like the Middle East is a little bit of a hotbed now, too. Who knows where this is going, but it certainly has impacted the spot market, which has been very quiet overall.

James Connor: The word that you mentioned a couple of times was uncertainty, and this is pervasive everywhere we look now in the financial markets, and we especially saw that in Q1 with numerous U.S. companies coming out and reducing guidance, all because of this economic uncertainty due to the trade wars, etc. How has this uncertainty impacted the volumes in the spot market? Where do we stand year to date? We're already halfway through the year.

Per Jander: I think looking at it, it's around mid-June, we were about just 25 million pounds. If you extrapolate that, we would get to about 50 million, which is on the lower end. 50 million would be great if this were 10 years ago. But then we got spoiled in the early 2020s when all the financial interest came into the market, and we saw years of 100 million pounds trading.

I wouldn't say it's completely quiet, but it's certainly less than it was at least a couple of years ago, when there was quite a lot of activity for financial players. Again, like I mentioned, people are just holding their breath and waiting to engage more. But hopefully, we'll get there. I'm starting to see signs of it anyway. I would certainly say that the overall uncertainty clearly impacts volumes themselves.

James Connor: I was surprised that you were able to acquire 650,000 pounds of uranium in one day, which is a big amount. Maybe you can speak to that and what volumes are available in the spot market at this time.

Per Jander: When things have been as quiet as they are, people tend to have their cards close to the chest and not say what they want to do. But then, like you mentioned, we were fairly successful one day and shored up quite a bit of material. They have much more to go, but we're also not in a rush to spend any of this. We're certainly not going to chase something to inflate it and see it come crashing down again.

James Connor: Can you speak to the nature of those sellers you've seen so far? Are they producers or financial?

Per Jander: I would prefer not to mention the types of sellers now. Overall, I think that the absolute majority is from intermediaries. They don't have minds themselves. But through off-takes, inventories, or whatever they might have, they sit on some inventories. We tend to get to those on short notice because they are basically mobile inventories.

From producers, it takes a little bit more time because they have clarity a few months ahead. Maybe we're getting this out of the ground now. We're starting to ship it over to one of the converters. It'll be 3 or 4 months from now. Even though we can agree to buy something with that much notice, we prefer a little bit of near-term delivery. That's what we've been focusing on for now.

We will certainly have discussions with any suppliers, too. But I would also say the list of suppliers with any material available soon is extremely thin. If there is even one name on there, I doubt there is. But I'll find out. We'll talk again in a few months, and I'll let you know.

James Connor: I'm sorry, when you said you prefer delivery in the near term, can you quantify that?

Per Jander: We may prefer to have it in up to two months out. We can certainly extend it longer, especially if there's an entity with a good credit rating. And the risk now, if it's a junior miner, we prefer to see that the pounds should be at the converter facility before we take possession of them. It's not a strict rule, but we like to keep it as short as possible.

James Connor: Per, what about the buy-side? Can you speak to what's happening on the buy side? Are there a lot of buyers in the market right now? A lot of utilities?

Per Jander: Spot market-wise? When we dipped down to the low 60s, even, which was a couple of months ago or a month ago now. Then we saw quite a few utilities step in and buy fairly meaningful quantities too. They were purely opportunistic. They're well-covered for a few years to come. They're like, "We wanted to beef up our strategic inventories because we know this is a good price."

They also knew that a carry trade could work in the low 60s, spot price and term price in the 80s. They have quite big balance sheets and don't have a problem putting stuff on them, so why not do it?

Those moves look pretty good right now. I’m the first one to congratulate them and say, "Hey, that's a great move." You should buy as much as you can. The ones who could buy have bought, and even the fuel buyers might think; they all probably know these are very good prices. Not every utility will, can, or wants to put that on their balance sheet because of other restrictions they might have.

James Connor: The utilities that have been buying or taking advantage of these lower prices, can you speak to their jurisdiction? Are they Americans, Europeans, or Asians?

Per Jander: They're all over the globe, I would say. There's no more from one specific jurisdiction than from others. It's a fairly good spread on that.

James Connor: Let's move on now and talk about the long-term market. It's also been relatively quiet, around 25 or 26 million pounds of trade year-to-date (YTD) versus 110 million pounds in 2024. Maybe you can give us some color on what's happening in the term market. I know you spend most of your time in the spot market.

Per Jander: The difficulty with the term market is that the spot market is frustrating because it's so opaque. Then you take the term market, and it's a few levels more opaque than that because all these contracts are bilaterally negotiated. There's no broker service. You can talk to the price supporters if you want, but not everything is reported.

Some of them could be just an ongoing relationship. You have a 10-year contract with a couple of years left, and it's about to fall off. It's like hockey and football players negotiating sports contracts. You start talking, and it's like, "This is going to be an extension, this is not going to be an extension." The fact that you have a few years left on a contract provides a framework for negotiation.

I've been at Cameco for a long time, and the blend-and-extend¹ talks that you have, though, they're quite meaningful. When you do a large extension like that, you don't necessarily report it right away. It might be at the end of the year, or, if you have a price level that's been there for a long time, and then you add something more to it so that the existing price level can impact the newer one. It doesn't qualify as a brand-new price point either.

There is some murkiness in this, making it very difficult for price supporters and anyone trying to sift through the information and figure something out from it. It is very, very difficult to say it. Sure, when you say that 26 million pounds, and if you would tell me in January, "By mid-June, we're going to be at 26 million pounds," I would say, "That's ridiculous."

But knowing what the year has been like so far and utilities haven't been sitting on their hands, there has been quite a lot of talk of them coming out. I think there have been quite a few negotiations, and they might not have been inked yet. Even if they have been inked, they haven't necessarily been reported yet. I expect that number (the YTD term-market uranium trade measured in millions of pounds) to come up quite a bit.

Where are we going to land? Is it going to be 160 million pounds? Probably not. But as an anecdote, I mean, Cameco has been saying on multiple recent investor conferences that they had their marketing team in China speaking to all the utilities in China, and they were discussing some new contracts potentially lasting from today until 2050.

I don't know how big those contracts are, but they're obviously going to be quite meaningful. Cameco doesn't even have mines that will operate in 2050, but Chinese utilities are willing to contract with an entity that doesn't have mines. If Cameco doesn't have mines, very few other entities will.

Sure, Olympic Dam will probably be around, but it all depends on what copper is doing and what they decide to do with that one. But that gives you a little bit of an idea of the appetite. I can't imagine that if and when those contracts are inked, we'll be in the 26 million pound range anymore, because just one of those contracts can probably be 26 million pounds alone, but we'll have to see.

There's a lot of uncertainty around that number. I would caution people who look at the term-market trade as the only price point and then try to extrapolate. It's very murky, and you have to be careful with the garbage in and garbage out stuff. Keep it in mind and look at it, but I would expect it to be a fair bit higher than what it is right now, anyway.

James Connor: You raised a few good points there. One thing I will say about the Chinese, this is why they keep kicking our butts in everything because they think so long term, whereas we in the West, we're thinking this week, next week, next quarter. But the other thing I want to bring up is that it sounds like there's still what we talked about earlier; there's all this uncertainty. Because of that uncertainty in the financial markets, there's a lot of, I guess, a lack of activity in the term market. This is why utilities are holding back. Would you agree with that?

Per Jander: It certainly is one aspect, 100%. The uncertainty or the lack of action is likely about timing—the fuel buyers might want to go out for a long time and say, "This is a great time to purchase uranium. Can I please have a budget allocated or not?" But then you're going to get on the radar screen.

If you're a big utility in the U.S. or anywhere else, it's not going to be at the top of your agenda. It's like, "Do you need it right now?" "Well, if you don't need it right now, just hold off because we've got terrorists to deal with. We've got potential sanctions or no sanctions to deal with. We've got global uncertainty to deal with." There are so many other things that take the bandwidth of decision makers, you might not get the attention that you need.

Many fuel buyers would need approval from boards to go out and collect some offers, and then they need another board meeting to get approval to go with one. It's a 3-4 month process. Then, likely it won't even make the agenda of the board meetings because there are so many things they have to focus on. It's that uncertainty, even though it might not spill over directly on the nuclear fuel market itself, but is nonetheless funneled through those dynamics, if you will.

James Connor: One other point I want to clarify is that when you talk about bilateral agreements, those are agreements done between producers and utilities. What goes on there, nobody knows. NDAs are signed. There's no obligation on the part of either party to report anything to the price reporters like UxC or TradeTech. Therefore, even though the number might be 25 or 30 million pounds, it could be significantly more. We just don't know.

Per Jander: It could definitely be more. In specific cases where utilities say, "You cannot report this." Otherwise, I think there are chemical standard practices that we don't report price floors and ceilings. If you have a base price component, you may report that if both parties are okay with it, but it will be on a no-name basis.

But in some cases, it might be that you can't even report anything, not even volumes. Otherwise, you can say, "Okay, we don't report anything on the price," but we can't aggregate volumes from a bunch of deals and do it on a 6-month basis or at the end of the year, or something like that. Even though one of the parties may want to report everything to be fully transparent, it takes two parties, right? You can't break the confidentiality there.

James Connor: We talked about the spot market, which is anything up to one year?

Per Jander: It depends. One of the reporters has three months and the other has 12 months. It depends on which entity.

James Connor: Then, what's the time frame for the term market?

Per Jander: Anything else.

James Connor: I want to ask you about RFPs.² What's happening there? Can you speak to any RFPs currently circulating? Maybe you can describe the size and terms.

Per Jander: I would say it's a mixed bag. Some of them are more or less spot, a couple of hundred thousand pounds here and there, and some of them are 10-year deals with half a million pounds each year. It's anything in between.

I would say it depends: some of them are for uranium, some of them are for enriched uranium product. Obviously, uranium is going to be one of the components, but you also have conversion and enrichment. It really is a mix of everything.

I was at an event in Sydney, which was like a side event to the conference, and Treva Klingbiel from TradeTech was speaking. In her view, several U.S. and non-U.S. utilities are on the verge of launching fairly sizable RFPs. We'll let the summer show what's happening. Still, certainly towards the end of the summer, around the World Nuclear Association Symposium, we tend to see a peak in activity right after that anyway.

James Connor: Can you quantify when you say fairly large RFPs? Are we talking a million pounds, 5 million pounds?

Per Jander: Again, it's very difficult because it varies case-by-case. When they come out, I think the Koreans are fairly public in what they do because it's part of their process, and they tend to be between 6 to 8 million pounds total. They haven't been out in the market for quite some time. Everybody expects them to come out with at least one RFP fairly soon.

Then there was a European utility last year that came out for enriched uranium product to the tune of 12 or 14 years, and it did a tune of 23 million pounds equivalent. Those weren't the right market conditions to launch it in, so they retracted it and did a smaller piece. But at least you know that it's uncovered demand that's going to hit the market at some point, and they're certainly not the only ones.

James Connor: I'm sorry. How many pounds?

Per Jander: Twenty-three million.

James Connor: Wow.

Per Jander: It was very big.

James Connor: Let's talk about what's happening with carry trades. Because spot's been trading below the term for quite some time now, many people try to buy in the spot and then sell it at a higher price. Maybe you can speak to what's happening there and how that impacts trading activity in both the spot and the term market.

Per Jander: In the first quarter of the year, according to UX, I think at least 3 or 3 and a half million pounds went into these carry trades. I mean, you add the utility purchasing I mentioned before to that as well. There was quite a bit of it.

I think that was what stopped the slide when the spot price was just sliding down further and further. As soon as you came into the low-mid 60s, it definitely stopped. That was all carry trades because there were no investors really stepping in.

As long as the term price stays where it is, that is a floor for sure. Then it always depends on financing rates, too. But at the current rates, you can clearly make the case that in the mid-60s, you buy that all day long, and then you can sell it at 80, escalated further a few years out in time.

Now we're mid-70s. That's a different story, but we'll have to see what happens to the term price here by the end of the month. We'll know a little bit more then. But it also depends on how much has been reported. Is there any base price component? Because there can also be a completely index-related component.

If you're a big supplier right now, I'm not sure that you want to cap your upside so much, or at least not with a base price itself. We did hear at this side event in Australia that I mentioned a few weeks ago, that the first time I've heard the ceiling of $140. Before, it was $130, $135, and now it's a ceiling of $140.

Unfortunately, Cameco is the only one transparent enough to mention it. That's what they get. Now, I would expect them to be able to get the highest ceilings because they are who they are, and they're in a great jurisdiction. But at least you're hearing the numbers are only going up anyway. That's an indication, if anything.

James Connor: Can you comment on the pricing changes in the enrichment and conversion markets?

Per Jander: They've held pretty firm, I would say. There are very small volumes because they are just the spot volumes in general, in enrichment and conversion, which are not very big. Conversion spiked up to 100. It's always come down quite a bit since then.

But still, overall, since the invasion of Ukraine, now a few years ago, both conversion and enrichment have four or five times the price of what it was at the time because Russia is such a big player in those markets. They're not a big player in uranium; uranium doubled, you would say, at least, but it certainly hasn't been more. A lot of the attention was on conversion and enrichment right away, and there clearly is contracting going on at those levels. We haven't seen it come down, at least.

New capacity hasn't been added either, so that's stuck there. I wouldn't say it's a bottleneck that prevents uranium contracting from happening, but it certainly has been more, and that's where the attention has been. Now, it will start pivoting to uranium because once you buy those components, you obviously need uranium. It doesn't matter how much conversion or enrichment you have; you need uranium to feed into it.

James Connor: Per, as we wrap up, I'm going to put you on the spot now. Where do you see the spot price trading at the end of the year? Are we going to be above or below $100 a pound?

Per Jander: That's a good one. A hundred sounds like a lot. I know if I've been asked a question over the last month, I've been like, "It'll be below." But it might be around $90. But considering the recent events, let's say $100 on the nose is a good one. We'll go with that. It's a little bullish. I totally get that. We've got to be very careful, too, because I don't have any fancy models, and I'm certainly not a financial adviser or anything either.

But considering the market's current tightness, the advent or recurrence of investors in the space, and the fact that utilities are going to come into the market, it certainly has the potential to go to triple digits, I would say so.

James Connor: Listen, we just saw the oil price go from $60 to $75 in a relatively short period. Anything can happen. This is what makes the financial market so interesting. We started this conversation by discussing some places you've been to in the last few months. Where are you going this summer? Any big plans?

Per Jander: No, just back to Sweden. I'm going to enjoy some nice quiet time in the Swedish forest. I'm looking forward to that. Maybe we'll chat again from my cabin. If the market stays interesting, we can check back in August and see what has happened.

James Connor: By all means, maybe I'll come to Sweden, and we'll do it in person.

Per Jander: We can certainly do that. We can go for a little boat ride and then chat about uranium.

James Connor: Per, once again, thank you.

Per Jander: Thank you very much, Jimmy. Anytime.

Footnotes

¹A blend and extend negotiation in corporate finance is when a company renegotiates a loan or lease by combining the current terms with new market terms (the "blend") and extending the agreement’s duration (the "extend") to improve cash flow or reduce costs.

²RFPs in the uranium market refer to requests for proposals issued by the U.S. Department of Energy, or other non-US government entities, to establish a reliable domestic supply of fuels.