Silicon's Price Crashed From $39 to $5 a Kilogram in Three Years
Polysilicon prices collapsed as Chinese capacity expansion outran even booming solar demand, a textbook oversupply correction at extreme scale.
Silicon’s price history is one of the most dramatic in this series: roughly $26 per kilogram in 2021, peaking near $39 in 2022, then collapsing to around $5 by 2024 and 2025, even as global solar installation volumes kept growing throughout.
A high concentration number behind a falling price
Running the index on silicon’s real 2024 mine shares (China around 85%, then Brazil, Norway, the United States, and Russia each in the low single digits) gives an HHI of roughly 7,251, among the highest computed anywhere in this series, the same pattern documented on magnesium’s economics page: an extreme concentration number coexisting with a falling price.
Why the price fell this far
China built polysilicon manufacturing capacity at a scale that outran even booming solar installation demand, producing one of the sharpest supply-outpacing-demand corrections in this series, more extreme in percentage terms than even lithium’s own boom-bust cycle covered on lithium’s economics page. This reflects genuine industrial-policy-driven capacity expansion, not primarily speculative trading.
Sources: price history references this project’s own published price data (USGS, industry polysilicon price reporting); HHI is computed directly from that data; the 2,500 HHI threshold is the US Department of Justice/FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines convention.