Silver Has the Lowest Concentration Number in This Series
Silver's mine-supply HHI comes out below 1,500, genuinely unconcentrated, even as the metal runs a real, persistent physical supply deficit.
Silver’s price has climbed from roughly $15.68 an ounce in 2015 to around $38 by 2025, a real, sustained rise that sits alongside two seemingly contradictory facts: a structural supply deficit, covered on this material’s supply chain page, and the lowest concentration index computed anywhere in this series.
The most dispersed mine-supply base in this series
Running the index on silver’s real 2024 shares across Mexico, Peru, China, Bolivia, Poland, Russia, Chile, Australia, the United States, Kazakhstan, Argentina, India, Sweden, and Canada gives an HHI of roughly 1,143, below the 1,500 threshold where regulators stop calling a market “concentrated” at all, the lowest figure computed anywhere in this dataset.
Why this is not the same as “low risk”
Low geographic concentration does not mean low supply chain risk here, covered on this material’s supply chain page, because the real constraint is aggregate quantity: byproduct mine supply cannot expand quickly regardless of how many countries it is spread across, and industrial demand growth, covered on the application-wise page, keeps outpacing it.
Sources: price history and production shares reference this project’s own published price and production data (Silver Institute, USGS); HHI is computed directly from that data; the 1,500 and 2,500 HHI thresholds are the US Department of Justice/FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines convention.