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.
These are shares of world production (mine or refined output, whichever the source reports), not trade flows. A country can produce a raw material and still import the refined or finished form, and vice versa; the “methodology” note below has the per-item basis and sources.
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 |
|---|
One country, seven markets
How many of these 12 inputs each country is the single largest producer of.
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.