MATERIALSDECODED
Titanium · Country-wise

Titanium by Country: Ore in Africa, Metal in China and Japan

Mozambique and South Africa mine significant titanium ore, but the metal sponge that matters for aerospace comes almost entirely from two other countries.

Simple World MapAuthor: Al MacDonald Editor: Fritz Lekschas License: CC BY-SA 3.0 ID: ISO 3166-1 or "_[a-zA-Z]" if an ISO code is not available
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This map shows ore mining. The metal sponge map, the one that actually matters for aerospace, looks completely different.
China
220 kt sponge
Japan
55 kt sponge
Russia
20 kt sponge
Saudi Arabia
15 kt sponge
Kazakhstan
14 kt sponge
Titanium metal sponge production by country, 2024, a genuinely different country ranking from the ore-mining map above. Mozambique and South Africa, major ore miners, do not appear here at all.

Why Japan appears here but not on the ore map

Japan mines essentially no titanium ore domestically, covered on this material’s geology page, yet is the second-largest sponge producer, because Japan built and sustained metal-sponge processing capacity, covered on the mining page, using imported ore, the same kind of processing-capacity-independent-of-ore-geography pattern documented on aluminium’s country page for smelting.

Sources: production figures reference this project’s own verified production data (USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025).