Abstract: Cobalt is a critical raw material to support the development of new energy industries and high-end manufacturing. Against the backdrop of spatial separation of global supply and demand and intensification of great-power competition over strategic resources, trade competition within the cobalt supply chain has become increasingly pronounced. Clarifying the global pattern of trade competition in the cobalt supply chain and assessing China’s competitive position have therefore become urgent scientific issues for safeguarding the security of China’s cobalt supply chain. This paper focuses on the cobalt supply chain, first identifies the major trading countries in the upstream, midstream, and downstream segments and examines their trade product structures. On this basis, the niche overlap model is employed to characterize the competitive relationships among major trading countries and their evolutionary patterns from 2015 to 2022, from the perspective of trade-product similarity. The results show that, in the upstream segment of cobalt supply chain, import and export competition are respectively dominated by China and the Democratic Republic of the Congo（DRC）. In the midstream segment, import competition is centered on the United States and Germany, whereas export competition is led by China and Germany, with China exhibiting a more pronounced advantage on the export side. In the downstream segment, import competition is mainly concentrated among China, the United States, and Germany, while China has established a marked leading position in the lithium battery export market, and its trade competitive advantage continues to strengthen. Overall, China enjoys certain advantages in upstream imports and midstream-to-downstream exports by virtue of its large trade scale. However, its upstream imports remain excessively dependent on the DRC, creating structural risks and leaving resource acquisition subject to considerable uncertainty. Accordingly, this paper proposes policy recommendations, including diversifying import sources, promoting the upgrading of key products toward higher value-added segments, and strengthening the monitoring and early warning of external policy shocks and supply chain restructuring risks, so as to provide a theoretical basis for enhancing China’s trade competitiveness in the cobalt supply chain and safeguarding supply chain security.