# Where does tin come from?

Source: Commodity Origins, https://commodityorigins.com/commodities/tin/ — data JSON: https://commodityorigins.com/data/commodities/tin.json — license CC BY 4.0 (upstream data keeps its license; see Sources below).

Tin comes mainly from China, which produced 71,000 tonnes in 2025, 24% of the world's 290,000 tonnes (USGS MCS). Indonesia (21%), Peru (11%) and Brazil (9.7%) follow; the top five together supply 76%. The biggest exporter of unwrought tin (HS 8001) is Indonesia (26% of world export value in 2024, CEPII BACI). The benchmark price, LME cash, was $55,385/t in August 2026, up 64% from a year earlier (World Bank Pink Sheet). Tin crystallizes as cassiterite in the last, water-rich fluids to escape from cooling granite, so the mines follow granite belts: the Southeast Asian tin belt from Myanmar through Malaysia to Bangka, the Bolivian Andes, the pegmatites of the African Great Lakes, Rondônia in Brazil and, historically, Cornwall.

*A soft metal used mostly as solder in electronics, plus tinplate and chemicals; the smallest of the major base metals.* Also called: Sn, cassiterite, tin ore, tin concentrate, solder.

## Where does tin come from?

| Rank | Country | Production 2025 (tonnes) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | 71,000 | 24% |
| 2 | Indonesia | 61,000 | 21% |
| 3 | Peru | 33,000 | 11% |
| 4 | Brazil | 28,000 | 9.7% |
| 5 | DR Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo) | 27,000 | 9.3% |
| 6 | Bolivia | 15,000 | 5.2% |
| 7 | Myanmar | 12,000 | 4.1% |
| 8 | Australia | 12,000 | 4.1% |
| 9 | Vietnam | 11,000 | 3.8% |
| 10 | Malaysia | 5,000 | 1.7% |
| | Rest of world | 1,700 | 5.2% |
| | World | 290,000 | 100% |

Source: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries, MCS 2026.

Tin is the smallest of the major base metals by volume, and its supply is unusually fragile. On this page tin production means mined tin measured by its metal content, unless refined metal is named. In 2025 China mined 71,000 tonnes, 24% of the world's 290,000 tonnes (USGS MCS). Indonesia was second at 21%, then Peru at 11%, Brazil at 9.7% and DR Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo) at 9.3%. Bolivia and Myanmar follow, and countries outside the 14 listed separately accounted for 5.2%. World mine output changed -1% from the previous year. To see the scale, the whole world's tin mine output is less than a tenth of its nickel and well under a fiftieth of its copper.

The geology is granite. Tin is carried in the last watery fluids to escape from a cooling granite body and crystallizes as cassiterite, a hard, heavy tin oxide, in veins, greisens and pegmatites at the granite's margins. Because cassiterite is dense and chemically tough, it survives weathering and concentrates downhill in river gravels and offshore sands, so most historic tin came from placer deposits worked by dredge, gravel pump and, on Bangka and Belitung, from the sea floor. The great tin belts are the Southeast Asian arc running from Myanmar through Thailand and Malaysia to the Indonesian islands, the Bolivian Andes, the pegmatite fields of Rwanda, Burundi and eastern DR Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Rondônia in Brazil, Nigeria's Jos Plateau, southern China's Yunnan and Guangxi, and Cornwall, where mining ended in the 1990s.

Reserves, the part of identified deposits that could be mined economically at the time of the estimate, stood at 5.7 million tonnes in 2025. Indonesia held 25%, China 21%, and Brazil and Myanmar each about an eighth (USGS MCS). Reserve life for tin is shorter than for most metals, and exploration spending is small because the market is small; a large share of supply comes from artisanal and small-scale miners whose output is not backed by any reserve statement at all.


## Who exports and imports tin?

Indonesia restricts unrefined exports and ships refined metal; Myanmar's Wa region supplies concentrate to Chinese smelters, so mine and metal maps differ.

### Exporters of tin ores and concentrates (HS 2609), 2024

| Rank | Country | Value (US$) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DR Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo) | $602 million | 34% |
| 2 | Australia | $308.3 million | 17% |
| 3 | Nigeria | $301 million | 17% |
| 4 | Republic of the Congo | $146.3 million | 8.3% |
| 5 | Rwanda | $78.6 million | 4.4% |
| 6 | Bolivia | $64 million | 3.6% |
| 7 | Indonesia | $45.6 million | 2.6% |
| 8 | Thailand | $31.9 million | 1.8% |
| 9 | Namibia | $25.7 million | 1.4% |
| 10 | Laos | $22.8 million | 1.3% |
| 11 | Vietnam | $21.9 million | 1.2% |
| 12 | Russia | $21.4 million | 1.2% |
| 13 | Tanzania | $16.1 million | 0.9% |
| 14 | Venezuela | $15.1 million | 0.8% |
| 15 | Myanmar | $14.1 million | 0.8% |

### Importers of tin ores and concentrates (HS 2609), 2024

| Rank | Country | Value (US$) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | $1.3 billion | 72% |
| 2 | Malaysia | $290.5 million | 16% |
| 3 | Thailand | $190.6 million | 11% |
| 4 | United Arab Emirates | $9.4 million | 0.5% |
| 5 | Poland | $8.4 million | 0.5% |
| 6 | Brazil | $1.2 million | 0.1% |
| 7 | Myanmar | $865,500 | <0.1% |
| 8 | Hong Kong | $854,339 | <0.1% |
| 9 | Rwanda | $375,670 | <0.1% |
| 10 | Belgium | $280,107 | <0.1% |
| 11 | Namibia | $247,548 | <0.1% |
| 12 | United Kingdom | $209,775 | <0.1% |
| 13 | Saudi Arabia | $201,963 | <0.1% |
| 14 | Cuba | $187,627 | <0.1% |
| 15 | Mexico | $123,743 | <0.1% |

### Exporters of unwrought tin (HS 8001), 2024

| Rank | Country | Value (US$) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Indonesia | $1.7 billion | 26% |
| 2 | Peru | $973.4 million | 15% |
| 3 | Bolivia | $691.1 million | 11% |
| 4 | Malaysia | $545.3 million | 8.5% |
| 5 | China | $487.9 million | 7.6% |
| 6 | Brazil | $304.1 million | 4.7% |
| 7 | Belgium | $290.5 million | 4.5% |
| 8 | Thailand | $247.2 million | 3.8% |
| 9 | Poland | $167.4 million | 2.6% |
| 10 | Spain | $141.3 million | 2.2% |
| 11 | Singapore | $116 million | 1.8% |
| 12 | United States | $108.2 million | 1.7% |
| 13 | Netherlands | $90.4 million | 1.4% |
| 14 | Germany | $83.8 million | 1.3% |
| 15 | Italy | $64.4 million | 1% |

### Importers of unwrought tin (HS 8001), 2024

| Rank | Country | Value (US$) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | United States | $707.7 million | 11% |
| 2 | China | $707.7 million | 11% |
| 3 | Japan | $592.6 million | 9.2% |
| 4 | Netherlands | $537.6 million | 8.3% |
| 5 | South Korea | $452.2 million | 7% |
| 6 | India | $404.5 million | 6.3% |
| 7 | Germany | $402.6 million | 6.3% |
| 8 | Singapore | $232.3 million | 3.6% |
| 9 | Belgium | $228.4 million | 3.5% |
| 10 | Other Asia, nes | $211.7 million | 3.3% |
| 11 | United Kingdom | $193.8 million | 3% |
| 12 | Spain | $174.1 million | 2.7% |
| 13 | Italy | $157.5 million | 2.4% |
| 14 | Thailand | $134.5 million | 2.1% |
| 15 | Austria | $130.6 million | 2% |

Source: CEPII BACI international trade database (HS22, V202601).

Tin trades mostly as finished metal, which is unusual. Concentrate (HS 2609) is a small trade worth $1.8 billion in 2024; DR Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo) was the largest exporter at 34%, with Australia and Nigeria next, and China took 72% of imports (CEPII BACI). Unwrought tin (HS 8001) is more than three times larger. In 2024 Indonesia led exports of unwrought tin (HS 8001) with 26% of the world's $6.4 billion, ahead of Peru and Bolivia, while United States and China were the largest importers.

Two policies shape those tables. Indonesia requires tin destined for export to be refined, assayed and traded through a domestic exchange before it can leave, and it licenses each mine's annual production plan, so the country appears as a major exporter of ingot and almost none of ore. In the other direction, concentrate from the Wa-administered area of northeastern Myanmar crosses the border to smelters in Yunnan and is refined in China, which is why the world's largest tin smelting country is a modest miner in some years and its imports of concentrate matter more than its own mines. Concentrate from the African Great Lakes, tagged and traced under schemes that grew out of conflict-minerals rules, ships to smelters in Southeast Asia. The result is a metal whose refined output is concentrated in a handful of smelters while its ore comes from dozens of small, informal operations.


## What does tin cost?

- LME cash: $55,385/t in August 2026; 12-month change +64%; 10-year change +201%; all-time high $55,385/t in August 2026; real high (2024 US$) $71,323/t in October 1978 (World Bank Pink Sheet).
- Tin, standard grade, LME spot (IMF): $52,882/t in July 2026; 12-month change +57%; 10-year change +197%; all-time high $53,238/t in May 2026; real high (2024 US$) $50,027/t in June 2026 (IMF PCPS).

Prices are monthly benchmark averages that lag the market; not investment advice.

### How it is priced

The benchmark is the London Metal Exchange tin contract, ticker SN, traded in 5 t lots quoted in US$/t and settled by delivery of refined tin of at least 99.85% purity into an LME warehouse. The lot is smaller than for the other base metals because tin is worth so much more per tonne. As with the rest of the LME complex there is a cash price for delivery in two days and a three-month price, and the spread between them signals nearby scarcity. The Shanghai Futures Exchange lists a yuan contract, and Indonesia's commodity and derivatives exchange runs the domestic ingot auction through which exports must pass.

Tin is the least liquid of the LME base metals. Open interest and traded volume are a small fraction of copper's or aluminum's, and warehouse stocks are often measured in a few thousand tonnes, which is days of world consumption rather than weeks. That combination makes the price jumpy: a single smelter outage, a licensing delay or a large position can move the cash price by double-digit percentages in a week, and the cash-to-three-month spread swings into steep backwardation more readily than in any other LME contract.

The series charted here is LME cash. In August 2026 it averaged $55,385/t, up 64% from a year earlier (World Bank Pink Sheet). The highest monthly average in the series was $55,385/t in August 2026; adjusted for US inflation the real high was $71,323/t in October 1978, during the years when an international agreement supported the price with a buffer stock, and the lowest monthly average since the series began in 1960 was $2,163/t in May 1960. Miners selling concentrate receive the exchange value of the contained tin minus a treatment charge and minus penalties for iron, arsenic, bismuth and tungsten, and low-grade or impure concentrate can carry deductions large enough to decide whether a deposit is worth mining.


## What moves the price of tin?

### Electronics production and solder demand

Solder is the largest use of tin, and solder is used to attach components to circuit boards, so tin demand follows semiconductor and electronics assembly rather than construction. Smartphone, server, appliance and automotive electronics build rates in China, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam and Malaysia set the pace. Because tin is a small fraction of the cost of a finished board, demand is insensitive to the metal price in the short run, which means shocks show up in price rather than in volume.

### Myanmar supply to Chinese smelters

Concentrate from the Wa-administered area of northeastern Myanmar became a major feed for smelters in Yunnan within a few years of the deposits being opened, and it is governed by an authority that has suspended and restarted mining by decree. Because that feed supports a large share of Chinese refined output, an order to halt mining removes concentrate from the world market with almost no notice, and stockpiles at the border give only a few months of cover before smelters have to cut runs.

### Indonesian export licensing

Indonesian exports must pass through domestic refining, assay and exchange trading, and every mine works to an annual production plan approved by the ministry. When approvals are slow, shipments stall for months even though the ore is in the ground and the smelters are built. Enforcement campaigns against unlicensed mining and against ore smuggled between islands have the same effect. Licensing delays have repeatedly cut the country's exports by large fractions of a year's shipments.

### Artisanal and small-scale mining

A large share of world tin is dug by small operators with pumps, sluices and small dredges, in Indonesia, Myanmar, DR Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria and Bolivia. Their output responds fast to price, which cushions rallies, but it also disappears fast when governments enforce permits, when a rainy season floods pits or when security deteriorates. Because these miners hold no reserves and publish no plans, the supply side of the tin market is harder to forecast than any other base metal.

### Exchange stocks and the size of the contract

Tin's warehouse inventories are small enough that they can fall to a few days of world consumption, and its futures contract is the least traded on the LME. A single delivery, or a single dominant warrant holder, can push the cash price far above the three-month price. That structural thinness is why tin has produced the sharpest spikes and the deepest backwardations in the base metals complex, and why some industrial buyers hedge with over-the-counter contracts instead.

### Recycling and thrifting in solder

Tin is recovered from solder dross, from tinplate scrap and from electronic waste, and secondary supply expands when prices are high. Manufacturers also reduce tin per joint: finer pitch components, thinner stencils and alternative alloys all cut usage, and the move from tin-lead to lead-free solder two decades ago raised tin content per joint but was followed by steady thrifting. These adjustments are slow, so they set the long-run ceiling on price rather than the short-run one.

### Conflict-minerals and traceability rules

Tin is one of the four metals covered by US and European rules requiring companies to trace the origin of tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold. Compliance schemes tag bags of concentrate at the mine and audit smelters, and a smelter that loses its conformant status finds Western buyers unwilling to take its metal. This does not change how much tin exists, but it splits the market into audited and unaudited material and redirects flows, which shows up as regional premium differences.

## How is tin produced?

Tin ore is almost always cassiterite, tin dioxide. Hard-rock mines follow veins and greisen zones at granite margins, underground or in open pits; placer operations dredge river gravels and offshore sands, or wash them with gravel pumps. Because cassiterite is much denser than quartz, concentration is done by gravity rather than flotation: jigs, spirals, shaking tables and dense-medium separators upgrade the ore into a concentrate that can run well above half tin by weight in placer operations and lower in hard-rock ones. Magnetic and electrostatic separation removes ilmenite, monazite and other heavy minerals that travel with it.

Smelting is simple in outline and fussy in practice. Concentrate is reduced with carbon in a reverberatory or electric furnace at high temperature to give crude tin and a tin-bearing slag; because tin and iron reduce at similar conditions, the slag is re-smelted separately to recover the tin without dragging iron into the metal. Crude tin is then refined by liquation, in which the metal is melted just above its low melting point so that iron-rich dross can be skimmed, followed by treatment with additives to remove copper, arsenic, antimony, lead and bismuth, and in some plants by electrolytic refining. The product is ingot at or above the exchange purity standard.

Secondary tin comes from three streams: dross and residues from solder pots and tinplate lines, which are returned to smelters; tinplate scrap, from which tin can be stripped chemically before the steel is recycled; and electronic waste, where tin is recovered alongside copper and precious metals in smelters designed for complex feed. Recovery from electronics is incomplete, because solder is thin, spread across a board and mixed with many other materials, so a large share of tin in end-of-life electronics is lost.


## What is tin used for?

Solder is the market. The International Tin Association put solder at 51% of world tin use in 2023, out of a total of 433,000 t, ahead of chemicals, tinplate, lead-acid batteries, copper alloys and glass (International Tin Association, tin use survey 2024). Solder joins components to printed circuit boards and wires to terminals, and tin gives the alloy a low melting point, good wetting of copper and enough strength to hold a joint through thermal cycling. Regulations restricting lead in electronics pushed the industry from tin-lead alloys to tin-silver-copper and other lead-free formulations, which carry more tin per joint; the same survey found lead-free alloys had reached about 92% of electronics solder by 2023.

The other uses are older. Tinplate, thin steel coated with a few micrometres of tin, is the material of the food can: it resists corrosion, is non-toxic and can be soldered and printed. Tin chemicals stabilize PVC against heat and light, catalyze polyurethane foams and coat glass containers. Tin is added to lead-acid battery grids and to copper to make bronze, the alloy that gave an age its name, and to make pewter and bearing metals. Indium tin oxide, a transparent conductor, coats touchscreens and displays. Tin's low toxicity relative to lead has made it the substitute of choice in several applications from which lead has been removed.


## Supply chain and chokepoints

Refining is far more concentrated than mining. A small group of smelters in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru, Bolivia, Thailand and Brazil produce most of the world's refined tin, and several of them are the only significant plant in their country. That is why Indonesia led exports of unwrought tin in 2024 with 26% of world export value (CEPII BACI) while China took 72% of world concentrate imports in the same period: one country ships ingot made from its own ore, another imports ore and ships the metal.

The physical routes are short and specific. Concentrate crosses the Myanmar border into Yunnan by road; Indonesian ingot leaves Bangka and Belitung through Pangkalpinang and Muntok; Peruvian and Bolivian tin goes out through Callao and Arica; concentrate from the African Great Lakes is trucked to Dar es Salaam and Mombasa and shipped to Southeast Asian smelters; Australian concentrate leaves through Townsville. Refined metal then moves to electronics assembly in China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and South Korea, and to LME warehouses in Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and the Netherlands.

The single points of failure are unusually stark. One administrative decision in one region of Myanmar can idle a large share of Chinese smelting capacity. One ministry's licensing schedule governs Indonesian exports. A single mine in eastern DR Congo carries a significant share of world concentrate and sits in an area subject to armed conflict, so a security incident there is a supply event. Warehouse stocks are too small to absorb any of these for long, and there is no strategic stockpile or buffer scheme of the kind that once existed. Tin is the base metal where the gap between the size of the market and the size of the shocks is widest.


## Key companies

- Yunnan Tin: smelter, China, listed (000960)
- PT Timah: miner, Indonesia, listed (TINS)
- Malaysia Smelting Corporation: smelter, Malaysia, listed (5916)
- Alphamin Resources: miner, Mauritius, listed (AFM)
- Minsur: miner, Peru, listed (MINSURI1)
- Thailand Smelting and Refining Company: refiner, Thailand
- Empresa Metalúrgica Vinto: smelter, Bolivia

## Timeline

- 1985-10: International Tin Council buffer stock fails. The council could no longer support the price on 24 October 1985, the London Metal Exchange suspended tin trading, and the last serious attempt to manage a metal price by buffer stock ended in default. (https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written-answers/1985/oct/29/tin)
- 1989-01: LME tin trading resumes. Tin returned to the exchange in 1989 after a four-year hiatus, restoring a public benchmark price for a market that had traded in the dark. (https://www.fastmarkets.com/insights/how-the-london-tin-market-sleepwalked-into-a-once-in-a-lifetime-spread-squeeze-corrected/)
- 1998-03: South Crofty closes in Cornwall. The last working tin mine in Europe shut on 6 March 1998, ending an industry that had operated in Cornwall for thousands of years. (https://www.cornwallforever.co.uk/history/south-crofty-tin-mine-closes)
- 2003-01: EU restricts lead in electronic equipment. The RoHS directive of 27 January 2003 pushed the electronics industry off tin-lead solder and onto lead-free alloys that carry more tin per joint, lifting demand in tin's largest end use. (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eudr/2002/95/pdfs/eudr_20020095_adopted_en.pdf)
- 2005-01: China becomes the largest tin producer. Chinese output moved to the front of the world ranking in 2005 and has stayed there, displacing the older Malaysian, Bolivian and Thai order. (https://www.ytc.cn/)
- 2009-01: Tin confirmed as the smallest LME base metal contract. Full-year 2008 exchange volumes put tin at about 1.5 million lots against 48.3 million for aluminum, a thinness that still shapes how violently the price moves. (https://www.internationaltin.org/tin-lags-growth-in-lme-trading-volumes/)
- 2013-08: Indonesia requires exchange trading before export. Routing every tin ingot export through a domestic exchange cut monthly shipments by most of their volume within weeks and lifted the LME price sharply. (https://www.internationaltin.org/latest-developments-on-indonesian-tin-trading/)
- 2017-05: EU conflict minerals regulation adopted. The regulation of 17 May 2017 required European importers of tin ore and tin metal above set thresholds to run OECD-aligned due diligence, with the main obligations applying from January 2021. (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2017/821/pdfs/eur_20170821_adopted_en.pdf)
- 2019-09: Bisie reaches commercial production in DR Congo. A very high-grade new mine in North Kivu began commercial output in the third quarter of 2019 and became a significant swing supplier of concentrate. (https://www.alphaminresources.com/2019/10/16/alphamin-announces-quarterly-production-and-sales-report/)
- 2022-03: LME tin reaches $51,000 a tonne. Post-pandemic electronics demand, disrupted logistics and record-low exchange stocks produced a near-vertical squeeze in March 2022. (https://www.fastmarkets.com/insights/tin-price-high-demand-for-technology-renewables/)
- 2023-01: San Rafael halts during Peruvian protests. The suspension of one large Peruvian mine on 12 January 2023 showed how few individual assets carry world tin supply. (https://www.internationaltin.org/san-rafael-operations-halted-after-peruvian-protests/)
- 2023-04: Myanmar's Wa authorities announce a mining suspension. The order of 15 April 2023, effective 1 August, halted an area supplying roughly a tenth of world tin concentrate and most of China's imported feed. (https://www.internationaltin.org/myanmars-wa-state-announces-tin-mining-suspension-from-august/)
- 2024-01: Indonesian licensing delays collapse exports. A switch to three-year work plans left approvals unissued and January 2024 exports fell by 99% from a year earlier, removing a fifth of world refined supply. (https://www.internationaltin.org/growing-concern-over-indonesian-output-amid-licensing-delays/)
- 2025-03: Bisie suspends mining as conflict advances. The operator ceased mining on 13 March 2025 as armed groups moved toward North Kivu, removing about 7% of world mined tin at a stroke. (https://www.alphaminresources.com/2025/03/13/alphamin-temporarily-ceases-mining-operations/)
- 2026-01: Tin sets a nominal record. The three-month contract closed at $53,462/t on 15 January 2026, above the March 2022 squeeze high, on continued supply disruption. (https://www.internationaltin.org/tin-hits-nominal-all-time-high/)

## Frequently asked questions

### which country produces the most tin

China mines the most tin. In 2025 it produced 71,000 tonnes of tin content in ore, 24% of the world's 290,000 tonnes (USGS MCS). Indonesia was second at 21% and Peru third at 11%. Tin is the smallest of the major base metals: world mine output is well under a fiftieth of copper's.

### where does tin come from

Tin comes from cassiterite, a dense tin oxide that crystallizes at the edges of cooling granite and washes into river gravels and offshore sands. The main belts run from Myanmar through Malaysia to the Indonesian islands, through the Bolivian Andes, the pegmatites of Rwanda and eastern DR Congo, and Rondônia in Brazil. Mines produced 290,000 tonnes of tin content in 2025 (USGS MCS).

### what is tin used for

Solder took 51% of world tin use in 2023, joining components to circuit boards and wires to terminals; rules restricting lead in electronics raised the tin content of each joint (International Tin Association). Tin also coats steel to make tinplate for food cans, stabilizes PVC, catalyzes polyurethane foam, alloys with copper to make bronze, and coats screens as indium tin oxide.

### what is the price of tin today

This site shows monthly averages, not live quotes. The LME cash price averaged $55,385/t in August 2026, up 64% from a year earlier (World Bank Pink Sheet). The highest monthly average in the series was $55,385/t in August 2026; the inflation-adjusted peak was $71,323/t in October 1978. Live quotes come from the London Metal Exchange.

### why is tin so volatile

Because the market is small and the supply is fragile. Tin is the least traded base metal on the London Metal Exchange, and warehouse stocks can fall to a few days of world consumption. Much of the ore comes from small, informal miners and from two jurisdictions whose export rules change by decree, so a single licensing delay or mining suspension removes a large share of supply with little warning.

### which country has the most tin reserves

Indonesia holds the largest tin reserves, 25% of the world's 5.7 million tonnes in 2025, ahead of China at 21% and Brazil at 12% (USGS MCS). Reserve life is shorter than for most metals, and exploration spending is modest because the market is small relative to copper, aluminum or nickel.

### which country exports the most tin

For refined unwrought tin (HS 8001), Indonesia led exports in 2024 with 26% of the world's $6.4 billion (CEPII BACI), ahead of Peru and Bolivia. For tin ores and concentrates (HS 2609) the largest exporter was DR Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo) at 34%, and China bought 72% of world concentrate imports.

### what happened to the international tin agreement

The International Tin Council supported the price with a buffer stock and export controls for decades. In October 1985 it ran out of money, defaulted on its contracts and stopped buying, and the London Metal Exchange suspended tin trading for about four years. Prices collapsed and many mines closed. No producer body has attempted a buffer stock in tin since, which is one reason the market is so exposed to shocks.

## Sources

- USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries, MCS 2026, fetched 6 September 2026. License: Public domain (US Government work). https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/mineral-commodity-summaries
- CEPII BACI international trade database (HS22, V202601), BACI HS22 V202601, fetched 6 September 2026. License: Etalab Open Licence 2.0. https://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/en/bdd_modele/bdd_modele_item.asp?id=37
- World Bank Commodity Price Data (The Pink Sheet), 2026-09-02, fetched 6 September 2026. License: CC BY 4.0. https://www.worldbank.org/en/research/commodity-markets
- IMF Primary Commodity Price System (PCPS), 2026-08-06, fetched 6 September 2026. License: © International Monetary Fund. All rights reserved (IMF terms of use). https://data.imf.org/en/datasets/IMF.RES:PCPS

Text last reviewed 2026-09-06. Cite as: Commodity Origins, "Where does tin come from?", https://commodityorigins.com/commodities/tin/.