Where the world depends on a single supplier
Twelve raw materials that modern industry can’t do without (battery metals, magnet metals, semiconductor inputs), and for most of them, one country produces most of the world’s supply. Ranked by how concentrated each one is, from USGS production data.
Share of world production held by the largest producing country, %
Notes: shares of world production, not of trade: a country can mine a material and
still import it in refined form, and vice versa. The basis (mine or refined output) and data year differ by input and
are given in each input’s detail panel and in the CSV. Dashed line = 50%. Figures for gallium, niobium, palladium
and platinum are country totals cited from USGS releases and press coverage of them, and should be read as approximate.
Source: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries, 2024 and 2025 editions.
Select an input, on the chart above or the list below, for the country, the use case, and whether it’s already been the target of export controls.
| Input | Top country | Share of world production (%) | Data year | Basis |
|---|
Which countries are the largest producer most often
A country that leads production of several inputs links the supply risk of industries that otherwise have little in common, such as batteries, magnets and chips.
Number of the 12 inputs for which each country is the largest producer
Notes: counts only the single largest producer per input; second-largest producers are not counted.
Source: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries, 2024 and 2025 editions; Simdots calculation.
Source & method
Data: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries (2024/2025 editions) and USGS-derived country production figures reported in USGS releases and industry coverage of them. Each row’s exact data year and basis (mine vs. refined production) is in the CSV and in its detail panel above.
Method: for each input, the figure shown is the most recent publicly reported share of world production held by the single largest-producing country. No trade-flow or customs data is used here: that would need paid access to detailed UN Comtrade / ITC Trade Map series, which this page doesn’t have; production concentration is the closest free, citable proxy for “who the world depends on.”
- This is a production concentration measure, not an export or import concentration measure, a useful distinction since several of these inputs (lithium is the clearest case) are mined in one country but refined almost entirely in another.
- Figures for gallium, niobium, palladium and platinum come from country-level totals cited in USGS releases and syndicated industry reporting of them, since USGS’s own published commodity-summary sheets for these are not directly machine-readable here; treat single-year figures as order-of-magnitude, not to the decimal.
- Twelve inputs is a curated, not exhaustive, list: chosen for combining high supply-chain criticality with a citable, recent concentration figure. It excludes several equally concentrated inputs (e.g. vanadium, titanium sponge, indium) simply for lack of a confidently sourced current figure at the time this page was built.
Licence: this page and its derived CSV are CC BY 4.0. Underlying data © USGS, a work of the U.S. Government generally in the public domain.