Magnesium's Concentration Number Beats Cobalt's

Magnesium’s price fell from over $5,000 a tonne in 2022 to roughly $2,500 by 2025, a halving that sits alongside, not instead of, the highest concentration number computed anywhere in this series.

The most concentrated material in this series

Running the index on magnesium’s real 2024 shares (China roughly 86%, Russia around 5%, Brazil, Israel, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and Iran each under 2%) gives an HHI of roughly 7,500, higher than cobalt’s already-extreme figure and the single highest number computed anywhere in this series. Unlike cobalt, covered on its own economics page, this concentration comes from production economics, not geological endowment, covered on this material’s supply chain page, which changes what a resilience model should actually recommend doing about it.

Why the price still fell despite this

China expanded magnesium production capacity, and global demand, while growing, did not keep pace, producing the same kind of supply-outpacing-demand price correction documented on lithium’s and graphite’s economics pages. A record concentration number and a falling price are not in tension, they describe two different things: how fragile the supply base is structurally, and how the current supply-demand balance happens to sit right now.

Sources: price history and production shares reference this project’s own published production and price data (USGS, International Magnesium Association); HHI is computed directly from that data; the 2,500 HHI threshold is the US Department of Justice/FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines convention.