Where does tin come from?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.