Manganese Is Only Moderately Concentrated, and That Is the Anomaly

Manganese’s mine-supply concentration is a genuine outlier in this series, not because it is extreme, but because it is not.

Running the index on manganese’s real 2024 mine shares (South Africa roughly 38%, Gabon 25%, then Ghana, Australia, Brazil, India, China, and Côte d’Ivoire each in the single digits) gives an HHI of roughly 2,285, inside the 1,500 to 2,500 “moderately concentrated” band, well below cobalt’s, nickel’s, or magnesium’s figures computed the same way elsewhere in this series.

Why the mine-stage number understates the real risk anyway

Despite this comparatively moderate mining concentration, manganese still carries real supply chain risk, covered on this material’s supply chain page, because the smelting stage concentrates sharply in China regardless of how spread out the mine-stage ore sourcing is, and because USGS rates manganese as having no satisfactory substitute in its dominant steelmaking use, covered on the mining page. A resilience assessment based on the mine-stage HHI alone would materially understate manganese’s real exposure.

Sources: mine shares reference this project’s own published production data (USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025); HHI is computed directly from that data; the 2,500 HHI threshold is the US Department of Justice/FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines convention.