Where does manganese come from?

In 2025 South Africa mined 7.6 million tonnes of manganese content, 38% of the world's 20 million tonnes (USGS MCS). Gabon followed with 25%, then Ghana (10%), Australia (8%) and Brazil (4%). The top five account for 85% and 8 countries mine it. Reserves are more concentrated still: Australia holds 34% of the world's 1.7 billion tonnes (USGS MCS).

Production is measured as contained manganese, not as ore tonnage, which matters because ore grades range from around twenty percent to over forty-five percent manganese. A tonne of high-grade Kalahari ore and a tonne of low-grade ore are very different products, and the price difference between them is large.

The map is straightforward. South Africa's Kalahari manganese field is the largest known deposit by a wide margin. Gabon's Moanda and Australia's Groote Eylandt are high-grade operations serving the export market. Ghana, Brazil, Ukraine and India contribute, and China mines a substantial tonnage of low-grade ore for its own alloy plants. Almost none of the countries that mine manganese are the countries that use it, because the users are steel mills.

There is essentially no such thing as a manganese-only market decision. Manganese is not optional in steel: it removes oxygen and sulfur during refining and adds hardness and toughness, and there is no cheap substitute for that function. Every tonne of steel made anywhere consumes manganese, which is why demand tracks world steel output almost exactly.

South Africa was the largest exporter of manganese ore (HS 2602) in 2024 with 49% of world export value, ahead of Gabon (26%), on world trade of $6.4 billion (CEPII BACI). China was the largest importer with 60%.

The ore trade and the alloy trade are separate businesses with different maps. South Africa, Gabon and Australia ship ore; China smelts the majority of world manganese alloys, silicomanganese and ferromanganese, largely for its own steel industry, and also exports alloy. South Africa has tried repeatedly to move up the chain into alloy smelting at home, and has been frustrated by the same electricity constraints described on the platinum page, since alloy smelting is enormously power-hungry.

The series shown is Electrolytic manganese metal, CIF Northwest Europe, which was $2,843/t in July 2026, up 40% from a year earlier (IMF PCPS). Read that carefully: it is electrolytic manganese metal delivered into Northwest Europe, a high-purity refined product used in aluminium and specialty steel alloying and increasingly in battery cathodes. It is not manganese ore, which sells for a small fraction of the metal price.

Ore itself is priced per dry metric tonne unit, a unit that trips up newcomers: one dry metric tonne unit is one percent of manganese content in a tonne of ore, so a 44 percent ore priced at five dollars per dry metric tonne unit costs 220 dollars a tonne. Benchmark assessments cover 44 percent lumpy ore delivered to Chinese ports and are published by private price reporting agencies rather than an exchange, so this site cannot quote them.

Alloys price separately again. Silicomanganese and high-carbon ferromanganese are assessed regionally and are driven as much by electricity tariffs and reductant costs as by ore. Because a smelter converts ore plus power plus coke into alloy, the spread between the ore price and the alloy price, not either one alone, decides whether furnaces run.

More than nine-tenths of manganese ends up in steel, and there is no substitute for its deoxidising and desulfurizing role, so demand follows crude steel production almost one for one. Chinese construction activity is therefore the single largest determinant of manganese demand, as it is for iron ore.

Turning ore into silicomanganese or ferromanganese consumes a great deal of power in submerged arc furnaces. When electricity tariffs rise or supply is rationed, alloy production falls and ore accumulates at ports, so the ore price can weaken while the alloy price rises.

Ore from the Kalahari must travel roughly eight hundred kilometers by rail to Port Elizabeth or by road to Durban. Rail performance has been poor enough that a large share moves by truck at higher cost, and export volumes are constrained by logistics rather than by mining capacity.

Because ore is priced per unit of contained manganese, a shift in the mix between high and low grade changes the average price without any change in the underlying market. Buyers blend grades to hit a target, so the premium for high-grade lump moves with the availability of cheap fines.

Manganese ore stockpiles at Chinese ports are large relative to monthly consumption and are watched closely as a short-term price signal. A build-up caused by weak alloy production depresses prices for months regardless of what mines are doing.

Lithium manganese iron phosphate and high-manganese cathodes use high-purity manganese sulfate rather than ore or alloy. Volumes are small next to steel, but this is the growth market and it requires a purification chain that barely exists outside China.

Because a handful of operations supply most of the seaborne trade, a cyclone at Groote Eylandt, a rail failure in South Africa or unrest in Gabon removes a meaningful share of world supply at once, and the market has no deep inventory to absorb it.

Manganese ore is mined by open pit and underground methods, crushed and screened into lump and fines, and sometimes upgraded by dense media separation or washing. Little chemical processing happens at the mine; the ore is essentially sorted and shipped.

The main conversion step is smelting into ferroalloy. Ore, a carbon reductant such as coke, and a flux are fed into a submerged arc furnace, where electricity supplies the heat that reduces manganese oxides to metal. High-carbon ferromanganese and silicomanganese, the latter made with quartz added to bring silicon into the alloy, are the two main products, and both are added directly to molten steel. Refined ferromanganese with low carbon requires a further oxygen-blowing step.

Electrolytic manganese metal, the product the price series tracks, follows a different route: ore is leached with sulfuric acid, the solution is purified, and manganese is plated onto cathodes. Battery-grade manganese sulfate uses the same leach and purification chemistry, taken to much tighter impurity limits, and this is the chain the battery industry needs built.

All figures on this page are contained manganese. Converting to ore tonnage requires dividing by grade, and comparing across countries without doing so produces badly misleading results.

Steel takes the overwhelming majority. Manganese is added to essentially every grade of steel to remove oxygen and sulfur during refining and to increase hardness, strength and wear resistance. Hadfield steel, a high-manganese alloy, is used where extreme abrasion resistance is needed, in rock crushers, railway crossings and excavator teeth.

Aluminium alloying is the second use: small manganese additions improve corrosion resistance and strength in the alloys used for beverage cans and building products. Manganese dioxide is the cathode material in ordinary alkaline dry-cell batteries, a large-volume and long-standing market entirely separate from lithium-ion.

The growth use is lithium-ion cathodes. Nickel-manganese-cobalt chemistries have used manganese for years, and lithium manganese iron phosphate is a newer chemistry that raises energy density over plain iron phosphate at modest cost. Both need high-purity manganese sulfate, and building that supply outside China is an open problem. Smaller uses include chemical oxidants, fertilizer micronutrients, animal feed supplements, glass decolourising and ceramic pigments.

The chain is short but has a serious logistics problem in the middle of it. The world's largest deposit sits deep inland in South Africa's Northern Cape, and the rail line to Port Elizabeth has for years carried less than the mines could produce, forcing a large share of exports onto trucks for an eight-hundred-kilometer road haul. This raises delivered cost, damages roads and caps export volume in a way that has nothing to do with reserves or mining capacity. Rail performance is genuinely the binding constraint on South African manganese exports.

Smelting concentration is the second feature. China converts most of the world's manganese ore into alloy, so an ore producer's real customer is a Chinese furnace, and alloy production decisions made for reasons of Chinese power policy or steel margins set the demand for ore worldwide.

Seaborne trade itself is straightforward bulk shipping from Port Elizabeth, Owendo in Gabon, Groote Eylandt in Australia and Brazilian ports to Chinese and Indian ports, with tropical cyclones the main weather risk on the Australian route.

The vulnerability that matters for the future is purification. If manganese becomes a significant battery cathode input at scale, the industry will need high-purity sulfate capacity, and today that capacity is almost entirely in China. That is the same pattern as graphite and rare earths: abundant ore, narrow processing.