Tin's Market Is Tiny, Which Makes Its Concentration Sharper
China and Indonesia together mine nearly half the world's tin, and because the whole market is so small, one country's disruption moves it quickly.
Tin is one of the smallest metal markets on this site by tonnage, roughly 290,000 tonnes in 2025, against copper’s 23 million or steel’s 1.85 billion, and that small absolute scale makes its real concentration numbers hit harder than the same percentages would for a larger market.
Why a small market concentrates faster, effectively
Because total tin demand is small, a disruption to either of the top two producers, a regulatory change to Indonesian offshore dredging covered on this material’s mining page, or a Chinese export policy shift, can move global supply-demand balance and price sharply, covered on this material’s economics page, in a way a similarly-sized percentage disruption would barely register in copper’s much larger market.
Tin as a named conflict mineral
Tin is one of the four metals (tin, tungsten, tantalum, gold, commonly abbreviated 3TG) named specifically in the Dodd-Frank Act’s conflict minerals provisions, a real, current regulatory framework requiring companies to trace and disclose sourcing from conflict-affected regions, covered in more depth on this material’s financing page.
Sources: concentration figures reference this project’s own verified production data (USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025); conflict minerals framework reflects the published text of the Dodd-Frank Act.