May 12, 2026 - From 2016 to 2025, China's total exports of natural flake graphite reached 1.0854 million tons and imports were 653,700 tons. Over the past decade, the export quantity has shown an overall trend of continuous decline, while the imports has fluctuated significantly, rising and falling, with the peak of imports being higher than that of exports.

During the decade, although China's flake graphite exports have generally shown a downward trend, there were still six years when the export quantity exceeded 100,000 tons, with 152,100 tons reaching a ten-year peak in 2017. Subsequently, the overall trend was downward, and the exports dropped to 64,000 tons in 2024, the lowest level in the past decade. 

The imports has shown a feature of "significant fluctuations": in 2019 and 2022, the import quantity reached two peaks of 193,000 tons and 160,000 tons respectively. Even in the relatively sluggish import years of 2020 and 2024, the import scale remained above 20,000 tons.

In terms of export destinations, China has exported natural flake graphite to more than 100 countries and regions over the past decade. The countries with cumulative export quantity exceeding 100,000 tons include Japan, South Korea, the United States, India and Germany. Among them, 186,100 tons were exported to Japan, 139,700 tons to South Korea and 124,900 tons to the United States. The following chart shows the export quantity proportion of the top ten export destinations.

In terms of import origins, China imported natural flake graphite from a total of 22 countries and regions over the past ten years. However, China's import quantity of flake graphite from Mozambique, Madagascar and Tanzania accounted for 96.87% of the total imports, with the import quantity proportions from the above three countries being 57.44%, 30.92% and 8.51% respectively.