The Unseen Price: Lithium, Under-invoicing, and the Invisible Architecture of Manipulation

When a price cannot be explained starting from the deposit, the certification, the project stage, and the real economy, it ceases to be a market price and becomes an instrument of economic control

For years, the price of lithium carbonate was presented as a neutral, technical, almost unquestionable data point. A figure that appeared in reports, contracts, and exports as if it were the natural result of supply and demand. But the problem was never the number. The problem was how that number was constructed.

That is the starting point of everything.

Long before the debate on critical metals, the energy transition, or economic sovereignty became mainstream, Pablo Rutigliano was already warning that lithium had a structural problem: there was no transparent, traceable price formation linked to the actual resource. What existed was a concentrated, opaque reference, functional to external industrial interests and completely disconnected from the mineral's origin.

The Price as a Tool, Not a Reflection

The international reference—especially the one associated with Asia—operated for years as an anchor price. Not because it faithfully represented costs, scarcity, or the strategic value of lithium, but because it served to artificially contain its valuation. In this way, lithium was paid for cheaply at the source, while value was captured in the later links of the chain.

This was not accidental. It was systemic.

When a price cannot be explained starting from the deposit, the certification, the project stage, and the real economy, it ceases to be a market price and becomes an instrument of economic control. And when that instrument is replicated in export contracts, the result is inevitable: under-invoicing.

Under-invoicing: The Visible Symptom of a Deep Distortion

The complaint regarding under-invoicing was born neither from isolated suspicion nor from a political reading. It was born from a technical analysis. If the reference price is distorted, everything built upon it will be too: exports, royalties, taxes, project valuations, and national balance sheets.

Rutigliano detected that the problem lay not only in the declared volumes but in the unit price utilized. A price that did not reflect the real value of a kilogram of lithium carbonate, but rather a manipulated reference, accepted uncritically and repeated as technical truth.

Under-invoicing, in this context, is not an administrative anomaly. It is the logical consequence of an opaque price formation system.

Why Denounce It?

The complaint regarding under-invoicing was, in essence, a denunciation of the pricing model. Against the normalization of figures that harm producing countries and benefit those who control the benchmark.

It was not about accusing isolated actors, but about exposing an invisible economic architecture:

• Prices set far from the resource.

• Absence of traceability.

• Closed contracts.

• A systematic transfer of value.

That was one of the central reasons why Rutigliano decided to move forward. Because when the price is wrong, everything else is wrong too.

The Metals Market: Bringing Order to What Was Fragmented

By 2020, Rutigliano had already understood that the lithium problem could not be solved with stopgap measures. That is why he promoted the Metals Market (Mercado de Metales): not as a traditional stock exchange, but as a concept of economic infrastructure designed to restore logic to the price.

The premise was simple and disruptive: There can be no fair price without a visible market, and there can be no real market without asset traceability.

The Metals Market was conceived to reconnect the price with the mining project, its stage, its certification, and its productive context. So that value ceases to be defined on a distant board and returns to being constructed from the real economy.

The Lithium Index: When the Price Begins to Explain Itself

From that same logic arises the Lithium Index, developed by Atómico 3. Not as a financial tool, but as a technical instrument for economic reading.

• The index does not impose prices. It exposes them.

• It does not promise valuations. It demonstrates them.

• It does not build a narrative. It builds a process.

By linking price with certification, project stage, and verifiable data, the index begins to show something that was hidden for years: there is a structural gap between the real value of lithium and the price historically used for exporting and declaring.

That gap explains the under-invoicing. That gap explains the loss of revenue. That gap explains why lithium "seemed" to be worth less than it actually is.

Anticipating is Not Guessing

For years, Rutigliano maintained that the price of lithium carbonate would recover. Not out of speculation, but because an artificial price cannot be sustained indefinitely without breaking the chain. Structural demand, supply rigidity, and long mining development times make a permanent containment scheme unviable.

Today, the data is beginning to align. The index shows clear signals. The market is tightening. And 2026 appears as a key year, not because of a specific figure, but because the pricing model is running out of room to hide the distortion.

The True Conflict

The conflict was never technological, nor financial, nor communicational. It was—and is—economic. It is about who defines the price and from where. It is about whether producing countries accept opaque references or build their own tools for reading value.

The complaint regarding under-invoicing, the Metals Market, and the Lithium Index are part of the same conceptual architecture: making visible what remained hidden for years.

When the price becomes traceable, manipulation is exposed. When the process can be explained, the narrative collapses. And when value becomes visible, the price can no longer lie.

That is the core of everything.