Insights
The minerals trade, in the detail that sets a price
Research for the people who carry the commercial risk. Extraction practice, market structure, shipping and the regulation that decides what a cargo is worth when it lands. Every figure is attributed to a named body and a date.
The archive
Everything we have published
Markets
The quartz bottleneck
One quartz is a common rock, sold by the tonne, abundant on every continent. The other is sold by the kilogramme, made in commercial volume in essentially two places on earth, and confusing the two is expensive.
4 August 2026/6 min read
Markets
How China licenses a mineral
A ban is the weakest instrument in the export control toolkit. It is visible, dated and repealable. A licensing regime is a far harder wall, and almost nobody outside the affected trade notices when one is built.
28 July 2026/6 min read
Markets
A supply shock in plain sight
South African ferrochrome output is on course to have halved, and then halved again, inside three years. The chrome chain has not had to absorb a contraction of that kind in living memory.
21 July 2026/6 min read
Policy and compliance
The due diligence your buyer inherits
The European due diligence directive does not bind you, and since February 2026 it binds a good deal fewer of your buyers. The questionnaires have not stopped arriving, and they are not going to.
16 July 2026/6 min read
Markets
The 181 dollar tonne
A tonne of marble leaving Pakistan in 2024 was worth, on average, 181 US dollars. The rock is not the constraint. What happens to it between the face and the buyer is the constraint.
14 July 2026/5 min read
Policy and compliance
What is actually in CBAM scope
Natural stone is out. Chromite ore is out. Ferrochrome is in, and the drafting that puts it there works in the opposite direction to the rest of the regulation, which is why the exemption and the exposure are not equally stable.
30 June 2026/6 min read
Markets
What a slowdown signals
A large copper project running late is unremarkable. It becomes informative when the operator's own risk assessment and the capital already committed to the asset start pointing in different directions.
16 June 2026/6 min read
Trade and shipping
The carbon price shipping does not pay
No ship anywhere in the world pays a global carbon charge, and the mechanism that was supposed to impose one is still being renegotiated. Where that process stopped is worth more to an exporter than any forecast of where it ends up.
2 June 2026/5 min read
Policy and compliance
The standards that stop a shipment
No laboratory issues a Declaration of Performance. The manufacturer does, over its own name, and it is that fact rather than any test result which catches sellers out when they first ship stone into Europe.
19 May 2026/6 min read
Trade and shipping
Why stone ships in a twenty foot box
A 40 foot container is twice the length of a 20 foot container. For dimension stone it will not carry twice the weight, and in practice it will not carry more weight at all. What follows from that runs back to the quarry face.
5 May 2026/6 min read
Extraction practice
What recovery is worth
Recovery rate is the only variable in a dimension stone operation that multiplies rather than adds. Every margin downstream of the face applies only to the volume that survived it.
21 April 2026/6 min read
Desks
Trade and shipping2
Markets6
Policy and compliance3
Extraction practice1
Talk to us
Bring us the deposit, the contract or the shipment
If something here bears on a decision you are taking, the fastest route to a useful answer is to tell us what the actual question is.