China has near global monopolies on these exports, accounting for 98% of global gallium production, 93% of germanium production, and 49% of antimony production.
While Antimony is certainly rare (contextually) and an earth mineral, using those terms are incorrect in the greater sense - One shouldn’t confuse it (as another reply did) for a ‘rare-earth metal’ or rare-earth element (REE) which is a wholly different group of elements with geo-political contexts.
Antimony is a metalloid (not quite a metal) and is about as scarce as silver, tin and iodine in the Earth’s crust.
Thanks for the context. Additionally, whether or not a metal is rare is a lot less important as to whether or not it can be found in concentrations good enough for extraction on an industrial scale. That’s where Hunan province comes in. They got the mines with the concentrations to make it worthwhile and they’ve got the economic and political willpower to get those mines running because it’s what they need. For that to happen in America we’d literally need to fully fund these publicly but of course we’d keep any profits private. Think of all the corruption and inefficiency you can imagine and there you’d have it.
