Tin is the oldest strategic metal — the alloying half of the Bronze Age — and the one the digital economy cannot solder without. Half of every tonne mined ends up as the joint between a chip and its circuit board; the rest lines food cans, stabilises plastics and stiffens bronze. It is dredged off Indonesia, dug from the deep shafts of a warlord-run enclave in Myanmar, hauled out of the Andes, the Amazon and the middle of Congo's war — and more than half of it is smelted in China. In 2023 the Myanmar mine that fed China's smelters switched off; in 2024 Indonesia's exports stalled in an $18 billion corruption case; in 2025 Congo's biggest mine evacuated ahead of M23; and in 2026 a market that had barely grown in a decade met the AI-server boom and priced tin at nearly $59,000 a tonne — a record. This page tracks where tin is mined, smelted and consumed, who can turn the supply off and who is building alternatives — using open data from USGS, BGS, the LME, CRU and the International Tin Association. Built for the tin trade — miners, smelters, traders, solder and tinplate makers — and for geopolitics researchers and think tanks.
0of tin mined worldwide in 2025 — flat for a decade while demand kept growing (USGS estimate)
0of the world's refined tin came out of Chinese smelters in 2024 — twice China's share of mining (CRU, BGS)
0reported intraday all-time high on the LME, 2 June 2026; the record close was $53,462 on 15 January (ITA, market data)
0global refined-tin deficit in 2025 — more than double 2024's (CRU via USGS)
Interactive map
The tin world map
Dredges and deep shafts, smelters and refineries, the mines switched off by warlords, courts and rebels — and the projects racing to replace them, from Cornwall to Virginia. Tap a marker for details; toggle layers below. Circle size ≈ scale of operation.
Tin is smelted close to where it is mined more often than most metals: Gejiu, Bangka, Pisco and Oruro carry both a mine and a smelter marker. The merchant smelters of Malaysia and Thailand are the exception — they run on concentrate shipped in from Africa, Australia and Myanmar.
From cassiterite to ingot to solder joint
One metal, many disguises
Tin travels as a heavy black oxide, as a 60–70% concentrate in tagged bags, as the 99.85% ingot the LME prices, and as the invisible joint inside every phone and server. Each form has its own buyers, its own regulator — and, in 2026, its own record price. Tap a stage.
From a dredge off Bangka, a shaft in Wa State or a vein under the Peruvian Andes to the solder joint on an AI accelerator and the seam of a food can. Six stages, each with its own bottleneck — and in 2026 the bottleneck sits at stage three, where Chinese smelters wait for ore that stopped coming.
← swipe →
Production & reserves
Where tin comes from
Mine production by country, 2025
Tonnes of tin content, log scale (USGS estimates)
Source: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 (2025 figures are estimates; world total ~290,000 t). Five countries — China, Indonesia, Peru, Brazil and DR Congo — dig about three-quarters. Myanmar, No. 3 as recently as 2023, has fallen to ~12,000 t with Man Maw suspended.
Reserves by country
Thousand tonnes of tin content (world total >6 million tonnes)
Source: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026. Roughly twenty years at current mining rates, but the reserve base is concentrated: Indonesia and China alone hold about 43%, and the West's share is small — Australia's JORC-compliant reserves are ~220,000 t.
The flat decade: mined vs refined
World production of tin, tonnes — mine (tin content) and smelter/refined (gross), BGS 2018–2024
Source: BGS World Mineral Statistics (tin, mine and tin, smelter series). Mine output has not exceeded 2010's ~328,000 t in any year since; the ~75,000 t gap between mine and refined output is secondary tin from scrap. BGS lists an apparently duplicated entry for Singapore in 2023–24 (Singapore has no tin smelter) which we exclude.
Explore where tin is mined and where it is smelted, country by country since 1970, on the supply-chain map.
Smelting
The chokepoint is the smelter
Tin ore is easy to smelt and hard to source. Cassiterite concentrate is reduced with carbon at about 1,300 °C into crude tin, then refined to the 99.85% ingot the exchanges trade — a step China performs for roughly half the world, largely on imported ore. When Myanmar's concentrate stopped arriving in 2023, the furnaces of Yunnan ran at half speed and the world found out how few other places could take up the slack.
Smelting geography
One Chinese tin capital, a state monopoly rebuilding itself in Indonesia, two merchant tollers — and the first new Western smelter in a generation
🇨🇳The Gejiu machine
Gejiu in Yunnan — "China's tin capital", mined for two millennia — is home to Yunnan Tin, the world's largest refined producer at ~91,000 t in 2025 (a quarter of world output), plus Yunnan Chengfeng and Gejiu Kaimeng. Guangxi Huaxi and Jiangxi New Nanshan complete a Chinese quintet that fills five of the ten biggest-smelter slots. Their weakness is feed: with Myanmar's ore gone, Yunnan and Jiangxi smelters ran at operating rates near 54% in 2025.
🇮🇩The state takes back the smelters
Indonesia's PT Timah (17,800 t in 2025) is being rebuilt into a national champion: in October 2025 the government handed it six private smelters seized in the Rp 300 trillion (~$18 billion) tin-corruption case — about half the country's refined capacity — and it targets 30,000 t in 2026 and up to 80,000 t eventually. Every export tonne must still clear a domestic exchange, and the energy minister now talks of ending refined-tin exports altogether to force solder-making onshore.
🇲🇾The merchant tollers
Malaysia Smelting Corporation at Pulau Indah (14,200 t in 2025, interrupted for weeks by a gas-pipeline explosion in April 2025) and Thaisarco in Phuket (8,800 t) are the market's swing processors: they buy concentrate from Africa, Australia and Myanmar that Chinese smelters would otherwise absorb, and their offtakes — Thaisarco takes at least 90 t a month from Namibia's Uis — are how new Western mines reach the market without a smelter of their own.
🇺🇸The first US smelter since 1989
The United States has not smelted tin since 1989 or mined it since 1993. Nathan Trotter, the Pennsylvania alloy maker, won $19 million under the Defense Production Act in late 2024, signed for Rwandan feed from Trinity Metals in May 2025 and in September began building a $65 million tin production plant in Martinsville, Virginia, due to run by late 2026 — the first new link in a domestic chain that Cornwall's South Crofty hopes to feed from 2028 with EXIM's help.
Sources: CRU Tin Monitor via USGS Mineral Industry Surveys (2025 company output, top-10 shares); SMM smelter operating-rate surveys via trade press; International Tin Association (Indonesian smelter handover, MSC interruption, Andrada–Thaisarco offtake); USGS MCS 2026 (Nathan Trotter, US history); Cornish Metals disclosures.
Where the middle of the chain sits
Share of world refined (smelter) tin production by country, 2024 — the stage every ingot passes through
Source: BGS World Mineral Statistics, tin (smelter) 2024, excluding the apparently duplicated Singapore entry (identical to Malaysia's figure); total ~369,000 t, China 54%. CRU puts 2024 refined output at 371,000 t with China at 194,000 t (~52%), the figure used in the text; our supply-chain map shows the BGS series as published (51.9%). United States output is secondary tin from scrap — the country has no primary smelter.
From cassiterite to Grade A ingot, step by step
The primary route (top) carries about four-fifths of refined supply; the scrap route (bottom) the rest. Scroll sideways on mobile →
Grade A = LME-deliverable tin of at least 99.85% purity. Semiconductor-grade tin (99.99–99.9999%) for solder bumps and sputtering targets is a tiny, high-value branch of the refining step. The 3T belt is the tin–tantalum–tungsten artisanal mining region of the eastern DR Congo and its neighbours, where concentrate is bagged and tagged under the ITSCI traceability scheme.
Demand
The solder that holds the chip age together
Tin demand is quiet, stubborn and suddenly fashionable: half of it is solder, and since Europe banned lead in electronics in 2006 that solder has been more than 96% tin. A phone uses a gram or two; an AI server uses roughly three times the solder of a conventional one. When the data-centre boom arrived, it met a metal whose mine supply had not grown in fifteen years.
What tin is used for
Approximate share of world refined tin use by application (ITA survey; shares rounded)
Source: International Tin Association tin-use survey (solder ~51%, chemicals ~16%, tinplate ~11%, the rest batteries, copper alloys, glass, PV ribbon and other alloys — sub-shares approximate). US use is skewed to chemicals (25%) and tinplate (16%) because so much electronics assembly happens in Asia (USGS MCS 2026).
The forces pulling demand
Slow-growing for a decade — then AI, and a market that pivoted into deficit
🔌The solder lock-in
Every surface-mounted component on every circuit board is held by a tin-silver-copper joint, and every chip package is bumped with tin. Lead-free rules (RoHS, 2006) made tin the only game in town, and USGS lists no substitute that works at scale — epoxy resins at best. Solder demand moves with electronics output, not with the tin price.
🤖The AI multiplier
AI servers pack more boards, more power electronics and far more solder than conventional servers — analysts put their tin use at roughly 6,000–8,000 t a year in 2025, heading toward ~25,000 t by 2030, with CITIC Futures estimating ~2,500 t of new demand in 2026 alone. Small next to a 390,000 t market, but arriving in a market with no spare supply, that increment sets the price.
🥫The can and the chemical floor
Tinplate — steel coated with a micron of tin — still seals most of the world's food cans, and tin chemicals stabilise PVC, catalyse plastics, coat glass bottles and form the indium tin oxide in touchscreens. Together they are a quarter of demand that barely notices the price: a can uses cents of tin. In the US, a 50% Section 232 tariff on tinplate steel since June 2025 has become a can-makers' issue in its own right.
389 ktof refined tin consumed worldwide in 2025 against ~371 kt produced — an 18,000 t deficit, up from 8,000 t in 2024, with China and the rest of the world both in deficit (CRU via USGS). Consumption grew 3%; mine supply fell 1%.
Geopolitics
A shutdown, a scandal, a war and a record
Tin's modern history runs through cartel collapse, warlord economics and courtroom drama. The 2023–2026 sequence — Wa State switches off, Indonesia freezes, Congo evacuates, the AI boom arrives — turned the sleepiest base metal on the LME into the best-performing one.
Oct 1985
The cartel breaks
The International Tin Council — a producer-consumer cartel that had propped up prices with a buffer stock since 1956 — runs out of money defending the price and defaults on 24 October 1985. The LME suspends tin trading for four years, the price halves, and Malaysia, Bolivia and Cornwall's mining industries are gutted. Malaysia mined 74,000 t of tin in 1970; it mines about 5,000 t today (BGS).
2010–2021
The conflict-minerals rules
Section 1502 of the US Dodd-Frank Act (2010) names tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold — the '3TG' — as conflict minerals, forcing listed companies to trace supply chains back through the eastern Congo; the EU's Conflict Minerals Regulation follows in 2021. Bag-and-tag schemes (ITSCI, from 2010) become the price of admission for Congolese, Rwandan and Burundian cassiterite.
2013–2017
Wa State becomes a superpower
An obscure deposit at Man Maw in Myanmar's Wa Self-Administered Division — run by the United Wa State Army, a 20,000-strong ethnic militia with Chinese patronage and a US narcotics-sanctions history — turns Myanmar into the world's No. 3 tin miner almost overnight: from a few thousand tonnes to 68,000 t in 2017 (BGS). Nearly all of it is trucked across the border to Yunnan, where it supplies over 99% of China's ore imports at the peak.
Mar 2022
The first $50,000 tonne
Post-pandemic electronics demand meets broken logistics and near-empty LME warehouses: tin trades above $50,000 a tonne in March 2022, a record. Eight months later it is below $18,000 as consumer-electronics demand slumps — the whipsaw that tells every banker why tin mines are hard to finance.
Apr–Aug 2023
Wa State switches off
The Wa authorities announce in April that all mining will halt from 1 August 2023, citing a resource audit; the real driver, the International Crisis Group later judges, was a struggle for control among Wa dynastic groups. Man Maw goes dark. Chinese smelters live off stockpiles, then off imported ore from Africa; a 30% tax-in-kind on any concentrate exports follows in February 2024.
Jan–Dec 2024
Indonesia freezes
Indonesia exports no tin at all in January–February 2024 as a switch to three-year mining work plans (RKAB) stalls permits — while the Attorney General's office alleges Rp 300 trillion (~$18 billion) of state losses from illegal mining in PT Timah's concessions between 2015 and 2022. Businessman Harvey Moeis of PT Refined Bangka Tin is arrested in March; his 6½-year sentence is raised to 20 years on appeal. National refined output falls 30.7% for the year (ITA) and world refined production drops to 371,200 t.
Mar–Apr 2025
Congo evacuates, Myanmar shakes
Alphamin halts Bisie — about 6% of world mine supply — on 13 March as Rwanda-backed M23 rebels advance to within reach of Walikale; a magnitude-7.7 earthquake hits central Myanmar on 28 March; and a gas-pipeline explosion cuts supply to Malaysia's Pulau Indah smelter on 1 April. LME tin spikes toward $39,000 in early April, then falls more than 8% in a day when Alphamin announces a phased restart from 15 April after the rebels pull back — into a market already reeling from US tariff turmoil.
Jul–Oct 2025
Prabowo's crackdown, Wa's licences
In Wa State, miners begin paying for permits under a new licensing regime (July). In Indonesia, President Prabowo orders the closure of 1,000 illegal mines in Bangka Belitung (late September), where illegal operations are said to account for as much as 80% of output and 12,000 t a year of smuggled exports; in early October the six smelters confiscated in the corruption case — about half the country's refined capacity — are handed to PT Timah. In Virginia, Nathan Trotter breaks ground on America's first tin smelter in a generation.
Jan–Mar 2026
The record — and the doubters
LME three-month tin closes at $53,462 a tonne on 15 January 2026, an all-time high, as Indonesian exports pause for the annual permit cycle and open interest surges on the LME and Shanghai. The International Tin Association says fundamentals are not the primary driver; China's nonferrous-metals association calls the rally "unreasonable". The same week, Alphamin reports a record 18,576 t for 2025 and guides to 20,000 t; on 14 January President Trump declines, for now, to impose Section 232 tariffs on processed critical minerals; on 13 February Indonesia's energy minister says the government will study halting tin exports; in March the Wa authorities formalise cost-sharing to dewater Man Maw's flooded shafts and the US Defense Logistics Agency seeks 1,978 t of tin for the stockpile.
Jun–Sep 2026
$59,000 — then the ore moves again
With Indonesian refined exports reported down more than 40% year on year as the crackdown bites, tin trades at a reported intraday high near $59,000 a tonne on 2 June 2026 before settling around $50,000–51,000. On 10 September the International Crisis Group reports that Man Maw is in a "slow restart" — "ore is moving again", satellite imagery shows new buildings, and China's imports of Myanmar ore in the first half of 2026 (nearly 40,000 t gross) already exceed all of 2025 — but output remains far below pre-suspension levels, and flooded shafts and depleted grades threaten the mine's economics. Tin holds near $50,000.
Sources: BGS; ITA (production reports, 15 January 2026 record note); Alphamin, MSC and Cornish Metals disclosures; USGS MCS 2026 and Mineral Industry Surveys; Indonesian Attorney General's Office and ministry statements via Tempo, The Diplomat and ITA; International Crisis Group via AFP (10 September 2026); White House Proclamation 11001; DLA notices via Bloomberg and Mining.com; market-data compilations for the 2022 and June 2026 price extremes.
Trade & prices
The thinnest contract on the LME
Tin is exchange-traded — LME in London, SHFE in Shanghai — but it is the smallest and least liquid of the base metals, which is why a mine halt in Congo or a permit delay in Jakarta moves the price by thousands of dollars. Underneath the screen price sits a physical market of concentrate deals, tolling contracts and an Indonesian rule that every export tonne must first clear a domestic exchange.
US refined-tin import sources, 2025
Share of imports for consumption — the dependency of a country with no mine and no smelter
Source: USGS Mineral Industry Surveys, Tin in December 2025 (annual imports 31,900 t, +26%). Net import reliance is ~77% of apparent consumption (USGS MCS 2026); the balance is recycled scrap. Poland's share is secondary tin from Fenix Metals.
The price, in checkpoints
LME tin, US$ per tonne — annual averages and the extremes in between
Sources: LME cash annual averages via USGS (2023 ~$25,900; 2024 ~$30,200; 2025 ~$34,200); ITA (record three-month close $53,462, 15 January 2026); market-data compilations for the March 2022 peak (~$51,000), the late-2022 trough (~$18,000), the April 2025 spike (~$39,000), the 2 June 2026 intraday high (~$59,000) and the early-September 2026 level (~$50,200). Extremes are approximate.
How this market actually trades
Four markets, one metal
The LME contract
Grade A tin (≥99.85% Sn) in 5-tonne lots, the smallest base-metal contract on the exchange and the most volatile: LME tin fell below $18,000 and traded above $50,000 within the same twelve months in 2022. The January 2026 record came with a surge in open interest that the ITA attributed to investors rather than users — a thin market that speculators can move, and increasingly do, with Shanghai's SHFE contract now setting the tone in Asian hours.
The Indonesian gate
Since 2013 every tonne of Indonesian tin must be traded on a domestic exchange (ICDX or JFX) before export, and every miner needs an approved work plan (RKAB). The 2024 switch to three-year plans froze exports for two months; the reversion to annual plans from 2026 gives Jakarta a yearly lever — and the crackdown, the seized smelters and the export-ban study make the world's No. 2 miner the market's biggest policy risk.
The concentrate trade
Mines that lack a smelter sell 60–70% concentrate at a payable percentage of the LME price. China is the great importer: Myanmar's ore crossed into Yunnan by truck under a 30% tax-in-kind, and when it stopped, Chinese buyers turned to the Congo, Nigeria and Bolivia. The merchant smelters in Malaysia and Thailand compete for the same bags — which is why an Australian or Namibian junior can sell every tonne years ahead of production.
The traceability premium
Tin from the 3T belt trades on paperwork as much as grade: ITSCI tags, RMI-conformant smelters and, since 2025, a US-brokered chain from Rwanda's Trinity Metals to Nathan Trotter's Virginia plant. M23's capture of mining zones in 2025 put Congolese tags in question and made "responsibly sourced" a bankable premium — and a geopolitical instrument.
Sources: LME contract specifications; ITA market notes; Indonesian Ministry of Trade and ESDM regulations via trade press; ITSCI and Responsible Minerals Initiative; US State Department and Nathan Trotter disclosures.
The quiet riser: DR Congo
The other supply story — and the conflict-minerals question it drags with it
The Democratic Republic of Congo mined about 27,000 t of tin in 2025 (USGS) — six times its 2015 output (BGS) — almost entirely thanks to Alphamin's Bisie mine in North Kivu, whose Mpama North and Mpama South operations produced a record 18,576 t in 2025 despite a month-long evacuation as M23 advanced. Bisie is one of the highest-grade tin mines on Earth and now supplies about 6% of the world; Alphamin guides to 20,000 t in 2026 and pays dividends from the middle of a war zone. Around it, artisanal miners at Kalimbi and across the Kivus dig cassiterite whose tags — and taxes — increasingly pass through rebel-held territory, while neighbouring Rwanda (~4,600 t) positions itself as the West's "responsible" alternative.
~9%of world mine supply came from DR Congo in 2025 — the fifth-largest producer, and the only top-five source outside Asia and Latin America. A single mine, one road and one armed group away from the market.
Sources: USGS MCS 2026; BGS; Alphamin Resources disclosures (January 2026); ITSCI and trade-press reporting on the Kivus.
Concentration risk
The China chokepoint
China mines a quarter of the world's tin, smelts more than half and consumes the difference — importing concentrate from a militia-run enclave in Myanmar, from the Congo and from West Africa to keep Gejiu's furnaces fed. Its leverage is quieter than in rare earths or antimony: no export ban, just the fact that when Chinese smelters are short of ore, the whole market reprices.
~52%
of the world's refined tin was produced in China in 2024 — 194,000 t of 371,000 t (CRU); the BGS smelter series gives 52% as published and 54% once its duplicated Singapore row is dropped. Its share along the chain:
Sources: USGS MCS 2026 (mine production 2025: China ~71,000 t of ~290,000 t); CRU Tin Monitor via USGS and BGS World Mineral Statistics (refined/smelter production 2024); CRU Tin Monitor via USGS (five Chinese companies among the ten largest refined producers in 2025, together ~152,600 t or ~41% of world refined output); International Crisis Group (Myanmar supplied over 99% of China's tin-ore imports at the 2016 peak).
Dual use
The metal in every circuit — and every shell casing's history
Tin made the Bronze Age's swords and the Napoleonic army's cans, and it makes the modern arsenal's electronics: there is no radar, missile seeker, radio or satellite without soldered boards, no ship without bronze and tin-based bearings. That is why a metal with no US mine, no US smelter and a 77% import dependence gets Defense Production Act money, a stockpile line — and a conflict-minerals law of its own.
📡Soldered into everything
Every guided munition, avionics box, night-vision tube, drone and satellite is a stack of circuit boards joined by tin-based solder; high-purity tin bumps the chips themselves. Defence electronics are a small share of tin demand and a total dependency: USGS lists no scalable substitute, and lead-free rules mean the alloy is now more than 96% tin.
🚢Bronze, babbitt and the fleet
Tin bronze turns propellers and gun bushings; babbitt — tin-antimony-copper bearing metal — lines the shaft bearings of ships, turbines and locomotives; tin-lead and tin-silver alloys seal, coat and join. The Bronze Age began when someone learned to add a tenth of tin to copper, and navies never stopped.
🇺🇸No mine, no smelter since 1989
The United States last mined tin in 1993 and last smelted it in 1989; it imports ~77% of the refined tin it uses — 49% of 2025 imports from Peru, 23% from Bolivia — and recycles the rest. Tin is on the US and UK critical-minerals lists (the EU's 2023 list left it off). The Pentagon's answer: a $19 million Defense Production Act award to Nathan Trotter for a Martinsville, Virginia smelter due late 2026, fed partly by Rwandan ore under a State Department-brokered offtake.
📦Tin pest in the stockpile
Below about 13 °C, pure tin can slowly transform into a brittle grey powder — "tin pest", the affliction blamed for Napoleon's buttons and Scott's Antarctic fuel cans. It has reached the National Defense Stockpile: in March 2026 the Defense Logistics Agency sought information on reprocessing 1,978 t of tin-pest-affected ingots and on buying 1,978 t of new LME-grade tin — nearly $100 million at current prices — after decades of selling the Cold War inventory down (640 t of potential disposals as recently as FY2025).
⚔️The 3T war economy
Tin is a conflict mineral by statute — Dodd-Frank section 1502 (2010) and the EU regulation (2021) — because cassiterite from the Kivus financed a generation of militias. In 2025 the question came back with force: M23 advanced on Walikale and forced Bisie to evacuate; ITSCI's tags in rebel-held zones lost credibility; and Washington tied a Congo–Rwanda peace push to critical-minerals access, with Rwanda's Trinity Metals as the "responsible" tin supplier of choice.
🐉The Wa State question
The world's most consequential tin mine sits in an autonomous enclave run by the United Wa State Army — the largest ethnic armed group in Myanmar, historically sanctioned by the US for narcotics, and dependent on Chinese patronage. Its 2023 shutdown and 2026 slow restart moved the global price more than any government policy. For China, Man Maw is a captive feedstock; for everyone else, it is a supply chain that answers to no state.
Sources: USGS MCS 2026 (US production history, import reliance, DPA award, stockpile disposals, substitutes) and Mineral Industry Surveys (2025 import sources); DLA requests for information via Bloomberg and Mining.com (March 2026); US State Department and Nathan Trotter (Trinity Metals offtake); Dodd-Frank Act s.1502; EU Regulation 2017/821; International Crisis Group via AFP; Alphamin disclosures; UK 2024 Criticality Assessment; EU 2023 CRM study.
Capital flows
Where the tin money is going
For a decade tin was too small, too volatile and too Chinese for Western capital: a $10 billion-a-year market with one listed pure-play miner of scale. Record prices and a critical-minerals label have changed the arithmetic — states now co-invest, bonds get placed at 13.5%, and the constraint is the eight to ten years a new mine takes. Presented as observation, not investment advice.
🇨🇩The dividend in a war zone
Alphamin's Bisie is the sector's proof that tin can pay: record 2025 output of 18,576 t, EBITDA guided at US$341 million (+25%), dividends raised to C$0.11 a share and 2026 guidance of 20,000 t from Mpama North and South — all while evacuating for a month as M23 advanced. Its share price is a live gauge of Congolese security risk; its cash flow, of tin at $50,000.
🇬🇧The Cornish comeback
Cornish Metals has fully financed the reopening of South Crofty — Cornwall's last tin mine, closed in 1998 — with a US$210 million senior secured Nordic bond at 13.5%, a £57 million equity raise including £28.6 million from the UK National Wealth Fund, and a £52 million shareholder facility from the NWF and Vision Blue; the US Export-Import Bank has signalled up to $225 million more against concentrate exports to America. First tin is targeted for mid-2028: the first new Western tin mine in a generation.
🇵🇪The incumbent reinvests
Minsur — the largest producer outside China, with San Rafael in Peru, the Pisco smelter and Brazil's Taboca (Pitinga) — plans more than US$400 million of investment at San Rafael as it heads for a 15-year production high in 2025 (Q3: 8,978 t in concentrate, grades up 8%). Peru's stability is why it supplied 49% of US refined imports in 2025.
🇮🇩State capitalism, Indonesian style
Jakarta is re-nationalising its tin industry by prosecution: six confiscated smelters worth Rp 1.45 trillion handed to PT Timah, a 30,000 t target for 2026 (Q1 output +82% to 5,630 t) rising to 80,000 t, annual permits as a policy lever, and an export-ban study aimed at forcing solder and chemicals plants onshore, as nickel was forced downstream before it. The upside is a national champion; the risk is that the world's No. 2 supplier becomes a policy variable.
🇺🇸Washington builds a chain
The US is assembling a non-Chinese tin chain piece by piece: Nathan Trotter's $65 million Martinsville smelter (DPA-funded, operational late 2026), a State Department-backed offtake from Rwanda's Trinity Metals — itself preparing a $100–200 million New York listing — EXIM's interest in Cornish concentrate, and the DLA's return to buying for the stockpile. Small tonnages, large signalling.
⚠️The risks
Every one mirrors the upside. Man Maw's restart could return 20,000 t or more a year to Chinese smelters and deflate the price that justifies Cornwall and Virginia; Indonesian policy can reverse as fast as it tightened; the ITA itself called the January 2026 spike speculative; a thin LME contract cuts both ways (tin lost 65% in eight months in 2022); and the junior pipeline — First Tin's Taronga, Elementos' Oropesa, Stellar's Heemskirk, Atlantic Tin's Achmmach, Andrada's Uis expansion, Tin One's Syrymbet — is mostly low-grade, years out, and dependent on the price staying where no banker believed it could.
This section describes where capital is flowing, based on public data. It is not financial advice.
Sources: company disclosures (Alphamin, Cornish Metals, Minsur, PT Timah, Nathan Trotter, Trinity Metals, First Tin, Elementos, Stellar Resources, Andrada); UK National Wealth Fund; US EXIM; USGS MCS 2026; ITA; trade press (Reuters, Mining.com, Kitco, Asian Metal, SMM).
Company tracker
The companies that move tin
A Chinese state giant at the top, a Peruvian family group and an Indonesian state champion behind it, two Southeast Asian merchant smelters in the middle — and a thin line of Western developers racing the price. Filter by segment or search.
Company
Segment
Key assets
Status & recent signals
Company status reflects public disclosures as of early September 2026. This is an observational tracker, not investment advice.
Sources: company disclosures & filings; CRU Tin Monitor via USGS Mineral Industry Surveys (2025 refined output); ITA; trade press (Reuters, Mining.com, Kitco, Asian Metal, SMM, Bloomberg).
Data & methodology
Open data sources
USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 — Tin — world mine production 2024–25 by country, reserves, US salient statistics (imports, consumption, prices, net import reliance, recycling), import sources, end uses, stockpile and the 2025 events narrative. The monthly Mineral Industry Surveys (Tin in December 2025) add 2025 import sources by country and CRU's 2025 company ranking and market balance.
International Tin Association — annual refined-production reports and top-10 smelter rankings, tin-use survey, the 15 January 2026 record-price note, and reporting on Wa State, Indonesia, MSC and company output.
Prices — London Metal Exchange (cash and three-month) as published in USGS annual and monthly statistics (S&P Global Platts Metals Week), the ITA and market-data compilations; Shanghai Futures Exchange via trade press. Intraday extremes are quoted from market-data services and are approximate.
Trade flows — UN Comtrade; Chinese customs data on tin ore and concentrate imports from Myanmar via ITA, SMM and ICG; Indonesian Ministry of Trade export data via SMM; US import statistics via USGS.
Notes — mine and plant coordinates are approximate; Man Maw and several artisanal districts are mapped at district level. Tonnages are tin content for mine production and gross refined metal for smelter output unless stated. The BGS smelter series carries an apparently duplicated Singapore entry for 2023–24 (identical to Malaysia's) that we exclude. Myanmar concentrate import volumes are gross weight, not tin content. Company output figures for 2025 are CRU estimates via USGS. Last data refresh: 11 September 2026. Header photo: old tin-mine workings near Pendeen, Cornwall, at sunset — Tom Corser via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 UK: England & Wales (cropped).
FAQ
Common questions
What is tin used for?
Mostly for holding electronics together: about half of all refined tin becomes solder — the lead-free tin-silver-copper alloy that joins every chip to every circuit board, from phones to AI servers. Around 16% goes into tin chemicals (PVC stabilisers, catalysts, glass coatings and the indium tin oxide in touchscreens), 11% into tinplate for food and drink cans, and the rest into lead-acid battery grids, bronze and brass, bearing alloys, pewter and the tin bath that float glass is made on. Tin is the alloying half of bronze — humanity's first strategic metal — and still has no scalable substitute in solder.
Which country produces the most tin?
China — about 71,000 of the roughly 290,000 tonnes mined worldwide in 2025 (USGS estimates), followed by Indonesia (~61,000 t), Peru (~33,000 t), Brazil (~28,000 t) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (~27,000 t); Myanmar, the No. 3 miner until its Wa State mega-mine was suspended in 2023, has fallen to around 12,000 t. Downstream the grip is tighter: China smelts roughly half of the world's refined tin (BGS and CRU data), and five of the ten largest smelters are Chinese, led by Yunnan Tin with about 91,000 t in 2025.
Why did tin hit record prices in 2026?
A market that had not grown in a decade met three supply shocks and a new source of demand at once. Myanmar's Man Maw mine — the main feedstock for Chinese smelters — was suspended by the Wa authorities in August 2023 and only began a slow restart in 2026; Indonesia's exports stalled in 2024 amid a corruption case and then fell again in 2025–26 as President Prabowo's crackdown shut illegal mines and the government floated an outright export ban; and Congo's Bisie mine evacuated for a month in 2025 as M23 advanced. Meanwhile AI servers, which use roughly three times the solder of a conventional server, turned tin into a chip-boom metal. LME tin closed at a record $53,462 a tonne on 15 January 2026 and traded at a reported intraday high near $59,000 on 2 June 2026, against a 2025 average around $34,000. The International Tin Association noted that speculative flows, not fundamentals, drove the January spike.
Is tin a conflict mineral?
Yes, by law. Tin is one of the '3TG' conflict minerals — tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold — covered by section 1502 of the US Dodd-Frank Act (2010) and the EU Conflict Minerals Regulation (in force since 2021), because artisanal cassiterite from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and its neighbours has financed armed groups for decades. The industry answer is bag-and-tag traceability (ITSCI, the Responsible Minerals Initiative) from mine to smelter. The issue is live again: M23's 2025 advance forced Congo's Bisie mine to halt, the industrial mine that now supplies about 6% of world tin, while Myanmar's Man Maw mine sits inside an enclave run by the United Wa State Army.
Is the world running out of tin?
Not geologically — USGS puts world reserves above 6 million tonnes, roughly twenty years of current mining, with far larger resources in Indonesia, China, Brazil, Myanmar, Australia, Russia and Bolivia. The problem is that mine output has been flat at about 280,000–300,000 tonnes a year since 2010: the big alluvial deposits of Southeast Asia are depleting, new mines take a decade to permit and finance, and a market worth a few billion dollars a year struggled for capital until prices doubled. Recycling fills part of the gap — refined production exceeds mine production by roughly 75,000 tonnes a year thanks to scrap — but CRU estimated a global refined deficit of 18,000 tonnes in 2025, more than double the year before.
Why do militaries care about tin?
Because every guided weapon, radar, radio and satellite is soldered with it, every ship turns on bronze and tin-based bearing alloys, and the United States has not mined tin since 1993 or smelted it since 1989 — importing about 77% of what it uses, mostly from Peru, Bolivia and Indonesia. Tin is on the US and UK critical-minerals lists; the Pentagon awarded Nathan Trotter $19 million under the Defense Production Act to build the first new US tin smelter in Martinsville, Virginia, due late 2026 and fed partly by Rwandan ore; and in March 2026 the Defense Logistics Agency sought information on buying 1,978 tonnes of LME-grade tin and reprocessing a similar quantity of stockpile ingots degraded by 'tin pest', the low-temperature decay that turns the metal to powder.
Need a deep-dive report on tin?
That's exactly what we do. We produce commissioned deep-dive reports for tin-industry businesses — miners, smelters, traders, solder and tinplate makers, electronics procurement teams — and for geopolitics researchers and think tanks, covering angles such as mine-to-smelter supply-chain mapping, concentrate and refined trade flows, Indonesian and Myanmar policy scenarios, conflict-minerals exposure and traceability, the Western project pipeline and its timelines, stockpiling and defence demand, and price scenarios. Every report is source-cited — charts, maps and citations included — and built on the same open, verified data behind this dashboard. Email hello@mineral.watch with a short note on what you need and we'll come back with a scoped proposal.
Custom research
Need an ad hoc data-driven research report?
We produce bespoke, source-cited research on tin and other strategic minerals for businesses along the tin chain — miners, smelters, traders, solder, tinplate and electronics manufacturers — and for geopolitics researchers and think tanks: supply-chain mapping, trade-flow and policy analysis, country and commodity deep-dives, built on the same open data behind this dashboard.
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