Tin

Tin is the connective tissue of electronics: roughly half of world demand is solder, the alloy that joins components to circuit boards in everything from smartphones to AI server racks and solar panels, where photovoltaic ribbon has become a fast-growing tin sink. The market is tiny, roughly 370,000 tonnes of refined metal a year, less than 2 percent of copper by tonnage, traded on a 5-tonne LME contract with the thinnest liquidity of the major metals. Small market plus concentrated supply equals violence: tin routinely posts the largest annual ranges of any LME metal: in March 2022 it briefly traded above $50,000 a tonne, roughly five times its 2020 low, and in late January 2026 a Chinese-led speculative rally pushed it to new records above $56,000.

The supply base reads like a geopolitical risk register. China and Indonesia are the two largest refiners; Indonesia's exports stall almost every January as Jakarta reissues permits, and a licensing freeze in early 2024 cut shipments for weeks. Myanmar's Wa State, an autonomous enclave run by the United Wa State Army, became the world's third-largest mining source and then suspended its Man Maw mines in August 2023, an outage that dragged into 2025. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Alphamin's Bisie mine, the highest-grade tin mine in the world, evacuated in March 2025 as M23 rebels advanced, and tin spiked to roughly $38,400 in early April 2025 before the mine restarted weeks later. With electronics, EVs, and solar all pulling on a supply base this fragile, the International Tin Association projects persistent deficits without new mines, and the development pipeline is nearly empty.