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USGS publishes no stock statistic for tantalum in the current dataset. No exchange contract; processor inventories are not disclosed.
Annual market size ~~$0.6-1bn.
The canonical 3T (tin/tantalum/tungsten) conflict-mineral metal — DRC + Rwanda + Nigeria + Burundi + Ethiopia together hold ~85% of mine output through…
Dual-lens check: USGS puts China at 50% refining; SEC filings independently put China at 43% of named-facility mentions — same direction, different lens.
Import-dependency chokepoints: 🇺🇸 US 100%, 🇪🇺 EU 100%, 🇯🇵 JP 100%, 🇰🇷 KR 100%, 🇨🇳 CN 80%.
Capacitor dominance is the central demand fact: ~50% of tantalum ends up in tantalum electrolytic capacitors (3-10× the volumetric capacitance of MLCC at the…
Per-country net position. Emerald = supply > consumption (net exporter); red = consumption > supply (net importer). 7 countries appear on only one side of the two source tables and are left grey — a missing row means not itemised, which is not the same as zero, so no gap is computed for them.
China is counted in this figure. Its annual declaration is UN Comtrade with China as reporter (primary, and the basis of the percentage above, which uses an annual denominator). The monthly bilateral series is a third-party republisher of GACC, not primary — top-partner agreement against China’s own declaration is 24/33 on imports and 15/33 on exports. UN Comtrade’s own China monthly series (not the republisher above) has been frozen at period 202412 since its release; a watcher flags the day it moves.
Customs cannot isolate this material. Its HS codes (261590, 810320) are shared with niobium, vanadium, so every flow figure here covers all of them together. No customs source anywhere splits them.
Denominator: UN Comtrade annual 2024, imports from World, 52 reporters (Taiwan absent from UN data entirely). Read the percentage above as “the importers on this panel are on file”, never as “we see the trade” — Taiwan is absent from UN data entirely, so it is never in this denominator and the true gap is larger than shown.
How much of China’s exports we see monthly: ≈249% of China’s non-EU exports — importer declarations from US, GB, MX, AU, ID, SG in the monthly feed (202608), annualised against BACI 2024. EU destinations (BE, CZ, DE) are seen separately through Eurostat Comext in EUR and are kept out of this ratio rather than converted. Not in our reporter set: Philippines (8% of China's 2024 exports), Taiwan (6% of China's 2024 exports), Israel (5% of China's 2024 exports), Russia (5% of China's 2024 exports), SV (5% of China's 2024 exports), KE (4% of China's 2024 exports) — national customs portals, not Chinese hosts; each is a route that can be wired. Above 100% means 2026 monthly volumes exceed the 2024 annual base or an HS basket was widened; it is shown unclipped on purpose.
Source: CEPII BACI HS22 2024 (reconciled from UN Comtrade annual; CIF/FOB harmonised). Annual and one to two years behind — structure, not a current figure; never summed with the monthly rows above. Includes Taiwan (BACI 490), which no monthly artifact here carries.
Largest single dependence: Japan supplies 46% of EU imports, of which €1.6m lands in CZ.
Source: Eurostat Comext monthly bulk, CN8 × partner × declarant (2 CN8 codes: 81032000, 810320XX). Values in EUR, declarant-side — a different basis from the USD/HS6 figures elsewhere on this page. Not summable with them.
Source: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 (public domain). Production and reserves are world shares of the USGS-published world total. Stocks, price and net import reliance are United States salient series — never world figures. Reserves are a single-year snapshot; USGS does not restate history, so a reserves trend needs each year’s file archived separately.
Economy at stake: a cut-off by CN would take $56M off US GDP (USGS puts that scenario at 18% probability; weighted, $18M). Tantalum, USGS Open-File Report 2025-1047 input-output model over 402 US industries, 2023 dollars. US economy only and a model estimate, not an observation. Source.
| Stage | Companies | Most exposed |
|---|---|---|
| Mining, refining, trading | 25 | Cargill, Incorporated, Louis Dreyfus Company B.V., The Elmet Group Co. (Elmet Technologies LLC) |
| Functional goods (magnets, chemicals, cells, components) | 63 | DB HiTek Co., Ltd., Makita Corporation, Meopta-optika s.r.o. |
| Industries that depend on them | 353 | ispace, Inc., LIG Nex1 Co., Ltd., Northrop Grumman Corporation |
Counted from our company dossiers and recomputed on every load. Stage is inferred from each company’s role and sector, and this counts companies, not output.
$176M of output at risk worldwide, 2.47× the $71M first-round loss. US $35M, EU $14M. Other suppliers: RW $422M · US $199M.
| Where it bites hardest | At risk | of its output | Named here |
|---|---|---|---|
| US · Non-ferrous metals | $6M | 0.00% | Materion Corporation |
| US · Fabricated metal products | $5M | 0.00% | Northrop Grumman Corporation, General Dynamics Corporation, L3Harris Technologies, Inc. |
| US · Motor vehicles | $4M | 0.00% | Ford Motor Company |
| Rest of world · Non-ferrous metals | $3M | 0.01% | none in our corpus yet |
| US · Construction | $3M | 0.00% | none in our corpus yet |
| ID · Construction | $3M | 0.00% | none in our corpus yet |
| ID · Fabricated metal products | $3M | 0.00% | PT Len Industri |
| RU · Non-ferrous metals | $3M | 0.00% | Solikamsk Magnesium Plant (SMZ) |
Output at risk if CN’s $71M of exports stop, propagated through every country and industry: OECD ICIO 2025 edition (released Aug 2025, revised Jan 2026), 2022 structure, BACI 2024 flows, supply-side (Ghosh) input-output model. No substitution and no inventories, so this is an upper-bound exposure, not a forecast loss; USGS’s price-based estimate above answers a different question. Amplification by year: 2016 2.4× · 2017 2.52× · 2018 2.47× · 2019 2.49× · 2020 2.5× · 2021 2.55× · 2022 2.47×. Named companies: dossiers headquartered there, in a matching sector, already exposed to this material.
Read against the card above: the EU buys 100% of its tantalum from outside the Union and produces it in 1 member state.
Source: Eurostat PRODCOM DS-059358, sold production by member state, EUR. Production, not trade — a different basis from the import figures above and never summed with them. Producers exclude states that only trade the code, and exclude non-EU27 reporters (PRODCOM also carries Iceland, Norway and candidate countries).
Source: China Data Portal (chinadata.live), an independent third-party republisher of GACC customs data — not primary GACC, methodology not disclosed by the operator. Cross-validated once against our own BACI 2024 extraction; treat as directionally reliable, not audited. Never summed with the flows or totals below.
Policy pressure on Tantalum is accelerating — 12 restrictive actions on record, peak severity 4, 5 in the last 12 months (vs 3 the year before). Most-active issuer: 🇺🇸 US (4).
Signals are read directly from the policy register's recorded cadence, pending effective dates, and responds_to cycles for Tantalum. They describe the trajectory already on the record — not a forecast.
Tickers and corporate names parsed from the company_refs field of every action whose target_materials includes tantalum — the specific operators a policymaker identified by name. Click a company to see the filings.