MATERIALSDECODED
Zinc · Country-wise

Zinc by Country: A Genuinely Wide Spread of Ten Producers

China leads zinc mining at about a third of world output, with nine more countries each contributing meaningfully, a moderate, not extreme, picture.

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
Lower shareHigher share
China's lead here is real but far less extreme than its position in rare earths, graphite, or magnesium, covered on their own country pages.
China
4100 kt
Peru
1500 kt
Australia
1100 kt
India
870 kt
Mexico
780 kt
United States
670 kt
Bolivia
500 kt
Russia
430 kt
Kazakhstan
360 kt
Sweden
230 kt
Zinc mine production by country, 2024. Reserves lead with Australia (64 Mt) ahead of China (60 Mt), Russia (29 Mt), and a long list of further producers.

Reserves confirm the diversified picture

Unlike the sharper reserve-production mismatches covered on lithium’s and tungsten’s country pages, zinc’s reserve ranking broadly mirrors its production ranking, Australia and China each hold comparable shares of both, reinforcing this as a genuinely stable, moderately diversified material rather than one with a hidden future concentration risk building underneath.

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