Titanium, unwrought

Primary uses. aerospace airframes and engines; chemical processing vessels; medical implants.

The chain — from the ground to the buyer

A critical material passes through distinct stages, and the country that leads each stage is often different — that gap is what this atlas exists to show. Each layer comes from a different public source with its own vintage, labelled below; shares are % of the world total.

● Reserves — where it could come from

Reserves are the deposits known to exist and economically worth mining — the long-run ceiling on supply, distinct from what is actually produced today. Titanium's reserves are broadly diversified: 🇦🇺 Australia holds the most (29%), ahead of 🇨🇳 China (28%) and 🇮🇳 India (12%). Tellingly, the country sitting on the most ore (🇦🇺 Australia) is not the one extracting it (🇨🇳 China) — geology sets the ceiling, but capacity and policy decide who actually supplies the market. USGS 2024 · reserves as of 2023

● Mined — where it is dug up today

Mining is where ore leaves the ground — the stage most people equate with “the source”, though it is rarely where the supply risk actually concentrates. Output is concentrated: 🇨🇳 China supplies 67%, with 🇯🇵 Japan (18%) next. That is effectively a single-country dependence — one government's policy or one region's disruption can move the entire upstream. It out-produces reserve-richer 🇦🇺 Australia while holding just 28% of reserves itself — supply power at this stage is built on installed capacity, not geology. USGS 2024 · 2023 production

● Refined / processed — where it becomes usable metal

Refining / processing converts ore into the metal or compound buyers actually purchase; it concentrates in fewer hands than mining and sits at the buyer's doorstep, which is why it is usually the true chokepoint. 🇨🇳 China processes 67% — concentrated. China leads both mining and refining, so its grip is structural rather than a pure processing gate. On the buffers: 19% of supply is recovered from end-of-life recycling and substitutes are only partial, while the US imports >95% of what it consumes. USGS MCS 2024

● Recycling & substitutability — the mitigants (EU CRM)

19% of supply comes from recycling end-of-life products — a meaningful secondary source that lowers the supply-risk score. Substitutability is medium — partial substitutes exist.

● Traded — who ships it

Actual bilateral trade of the traded form, reconciled from UN Comtrade / CEPII BACI. Pick a year below — 2018–2024 measured, 2025* nowcast, 2026** directional scenario. The full 2002–2026 range is on the interactive atlas.

Context

Aerospace-grade titanium, post-Russia. The naive view says France (~40%); the corrected view shows Kazakhstan (~33%) and the US (~25%) - the sponge supply that replaced Russia after 2022. A recognised strategic metal sourced from Central Asia, invisible in the member-state view.

Every figure on this page is computed from out/data.json and out/flows_2024.json by build_profiles.py — no hand-entered numbers.