Byproducts and Chokepoints

There is no other concentration figure in this index like this one. The U.S. Geological Survey records that China accounted for 99% of worldwide primary low-purity gallium production. In absolute terms: an estimated 750,000 kilograms of a world total of 760,000 in 2024, against Russia at 6,000 and Japan and South Korea at 3,000 each. The United States produced none in any year from 2020 to 2024 and relied on imports for 100% of reported consumption in every one of them.

The list of other producers is short and getting shorter. Germany, Hungary and Kazakhstan ceased primary production in 2016, 2015 and 2013. Ukraine most likely ceased in 2022 because of the conflict with Russia.

The structural reason is that neither metal is mined. Gallium is recovered mostly as a byproduct of refining bauxite, whose average gallium content is 50 parts per million, with the rest from zinc-processing residues; germanium comes from zinc concentrates. A metal produced for its own sake responds to its own price — demand rises, price rises, marginal supply opens. A byproduct does not, because the host operation's economics dominate and nobody refines bauxite to get gallium. So the supply curve is close to vertical, and a price can rise sharply without production following. Germanium metal's annual average price went from $1,046 per kilogram in 2020 to an estimated $2,100 in 2024 while U.S. primary refinery production stayed at nil throughout.

Germanium's dependence is differently shaped, and the difference shows what a partial supply chain looks like. The United States mines some germanium-bearing zinc concentrate in Alaska and ships it to Canada for refining; a Tennessee mine that also produced it was suspended through 2024. Downstream, a company in Utah makes germanium wafers mostly for satellite solar cells and a company in Oklahoma makes tetrachloride for fibre optics — both from imported and recycled material. The country mines a little of the ore, refines almost none of it, and manufactures finished components from metal it buys back. The whole import trade was estimated at $50 million in 2024.

Now the control measures, in the words of the instrument rather than of coverage about it. Ministry of Commerce Notice 2024 No. 46 of 3 December 2024 provides, in a Georgetown translation, that *in principle* the export of gallium, germanium, antimony and superhard materials to the United States is not permitted; that export of dual-use items to U.S. military users or military uses is prohibited, with no qualification; and that graphite faces stricter end-use checks rather than prohibition. The material prohibition is hedged and the military one is not — a distinction most summaries lose.

And here is the qualification that changes how the whole thing should be read. Trade reporting records that no direct exports of the controlled materials from China to the United States had been made since the *first* controls, of August 2023 — so the December 2024 instrument prohibited a flow that had already stopped more than a year earlier. That makes it a formalisation and a signal rather than a rupture. It still matters, because a legal prohibition forecloses re-export routes that an informal halt does not. But the concentration is structural and long-standing, while the control is recent and reversible — two different facts that coverage tends to fuse.

The reversibility showed quickly: on 9 November 2025 the ministry announced it would suspend the ban until 27 November 2026, leaving the military end-use prohibition unaddressed. Controls of this kind are negotiating instruments and they move in both directions.

One thing did change behaviour, and it is the Geological Survey that records it: owing to the 2023 controls, the United States and other countries are pursuing the start or restart of domestic primary gallium production, with at least one company exploring feasibility. Note the dates on everything here. The statistics are from the January 2025 edition and their most recent figures are 2024 estimates, so this page describes the position up to 2024 and not after.