Hafnium —which you’ve probably never heard of— went up 7X in 16 months!
Antimony’s price has jumped ~+375% since start of 2024
Rhenium, ~+100% YOY
These niche, high-temperature minor metals used by industry for everything from bullets and superalloys to advanced fighter aircraft and turbine engines, are facing acute supply squeezes and stiff competition from other metal-hungry industries.
The first cause for concern must be antimony — used to harden lead bullets and make flame-retardant materials. Once traded comfortably below the $15,000-a-tonne mark in Europe, antimony has jumped in price by about 375 per cent since the start of 2024because of a global feedstock shortage and Chinese export controls that came into effect in September 2024.
The current price of duty-unpaid material in Europe’s principal Rotterdam hub is $56,000-$58,000 a tonne. Fierce competition for materials is likely to guarantee unusually high antimony prices for the foreseeable future.
This same issue of supply-chain inelasticity recurs many times in metals markets right across the periodic table. Rhenium — a high-temperature minor metal used in alloys to make high-pressure turbine blades for jet engines — startled many last summer when its prices suddenly shot up after barely moving for years. The cause? A huge wave of purchasing by China colliding with rising demand from the aerospace and medical industries elsewhere, and a supply base that simply couldn’t keep up. Rotterdam prices for catalyst grade rhenium ammonium perrhenate (minimum 69.4 per cent of the metal) have almost doubled year on year to $1,800-1,900/kg. Rhenium has several uses in the medical industry such as making implants, cancer detection, radiotherapy and treating bone pain.
Hafnium spent years trading at around $750-1,200/kg. It traded as high as $6950/kg, and now trades at $3700-3900/kg. This is another high-temp minor metal, used by the aerospace industry in superalloys. It underwent an extraordinary rally from April 2022 to August 2023, as buyers from the aerospace and electronics industries went out shopping after Covid-19.
Not only that but the electronics sector was booming, and a number of new applications were under development for the metal. As with rhenium, supply couldn’t keep up. The global benchmark, assessed by Argus, peaked at $6,950/kg with duty unpaid at Rotterdam in August 2023 and at $3,700-3,900/kg. still remains way above historic norms of $750-1,200/kg.
Read the whole post from Argus on the FT here:
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