Column: Bigger things predicted for tiny tin market

By Andy Home

6 Min Read

LONDON (Reuters) - Tin has escaped relatively unscathed from this year's pandemic.

Lockdowns around the world have prompted households to stock up on long-lasting food and buy more home electronics, providing a boost for the metal in tinplate and soldering and helping mitigate the broader downturn in global manufacturing activity.

Tin production, meanwhile, was particularly hard hit earlier this year with some of the world's biggest producers temporarily shuttering mines and smelters during lockdowns.

The net result will be a global supply-demand deficit of around 5,200 tonnes this year, according to the International Tin Association (ITA).

The ITA is forecasting a smaller 2,700-tonne deficit in 2021 as demand rebounds by six percent, a similar-sized recovery to that after the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

More deficits may follow as tin demand experiences a step-change in usage.

This is not yet about tin's under-appreciated role in the coming green and industrial revolutions but rather what's going on in the microscopic world of circuit-board soldering.

Soldering now accounts for around half of global tin usage. It has become an ever more dominant component of tin demand as the world's appetite for mobile phones, laptops and smart televisions keeps growing.

However, tin has yet to fully benefit from the electronic goods boom because the amount of metal used in solders has steadily declined.

Miniaturisation of components means today's typical circuit board uses half the amount of tin as ten years ago, according to Dr Jeremy Pearce, head of market intelligence at the ITA.

So while global shipments of semi-conductors have been rising at an annual rate of around 4% per year over the last decade, tin usage in soldering has largely flat-lined.

This trend is now coming to an end, Pearce told the ITA's annual seminar, with the transition to surface-mount soldering, which uses less tin, now "completing". Miniaturisation has largely run its course.

That means tin usage in soldering should start tracking more closely the underlying rate of growth in electronic goods.

Meanwhile, the phase-out of lead in solders is expected to accelerate as regulators steadily tighten the parameters for using what is designated a hazardous material.

Less lead means more tin.

Lead-free solders averaged around 65% of the global total over the last decade, jumping to 74% last year, Pearce said.

The ITA is predicting a continued increase, with lead-free solders accounting for 90% of all solders by 2030.

If the ITA is right, it means that the single-biggest dampener on tin demand over the last 10 years is going to dissipate.

These micro changes in the soldering world are doubly significant for tin demand since the coming fourth industrial revolution is going to need a lot more circuit boards.

The so-called Internet of Things, with enhanced connectivity across machines and appliances, will literally be glued together with tin solders.

Tin has been around a long time. When humans first discovered the metal could be alloyed with copper, the revolutionary new product gave its name to what we know as the Bronze Age.

Fast forward five thousand years and tin is set to become one of the most important metals not just in the fourth industrial revolution, but also in green technology, according to a surprise finding by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At one level this is just about more electronics. An electric vehicle has around five times more gadgetry than a conventional car and auto electronics is already growing at an average rate of 7% per year, according to the ITA.

The roll-out of 5G technology will mean more base stations and micro stations, all held together by tin.

However, the metal is also seeing an explosion in research and development across a number of future applications.

The ITA is picking up over twenty research papers per month just on the potential for tin in lithium-ion batteries, according to Pearce.

Researchers are also working on tin perovskite for solar panels, tin selenide for harvesting heat energy and tin catalysts both for splitting water to produce hydrogen and for carbon capture.

Just about any and every new technology, green or internet, seems to have a place for tin.

All of this, by the ITA's own admission, lies over the medium-term horizon. Such innovations may only start to translate into concrete tin demand drivers in around five years.

Before then, it's down to the soldering sector as the negative impact of miniaturisation fades.

The ITA expects underlying tin demand growth to double from 2% to 4% over the next five years, potentially posing a challenge to the world's tin producers.

The ITA's forecast deficit in 2021 would represent the fourth consecutive year of supply shortfall.

While the cumulative deficit of 18,500 tonnes is modest in a 360,000-tonne global market, it suggests a supply side struggling to keep up with even the under-powered demand growth of recent years.

China, the world's largest producer, has become partly dependent on raw materials from Myanmar, which emerged as the world's third largest tin miner over the last decade.

But there are serious question-marks over the sustainability of Myanmar mines and concentrate shipments to China have been falling for three consecutive years.

Indonesia, the world's largest tin exporter, has been a volatile supplier at times, largely due to shifting regulations on the tin mining sector.

Other new-age metals such as cobalt and lithium have shown what happens when producers get caught unawares by tectonic changes in demand. Prices of both have boomed and bust in the space of five years.

Tin producers should take note. Particularly since tiny tin's big demand revolution is taking place out of sight in the miniature world of circuit-board soldering.

The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.

Editing by Kirsten Donovan

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