[Vietnam] Vietnam’s domestic steel market remained relatively stable, with construction steel prices holding at around 533 USD/tonne as exchange rates and market conditions were largely unchanged. HRC prices stood at around 515–522 USD/tonne CFR Ho Chi Minh City following Formosa Hà Tĩnh’s latest price announcement, while subdued demand continued to weigh on the market. Meanwhile, Malaysia’s Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry (MITI) initiated an expiry review of anti-dumping duties on pre-painted steel coils from China and Vietnam, with a final determination expected within 180 days. The review could affect regional coated steel trade flows and supplier competitiveness.

According to foreign media reports, India's state-owned Hindustan Copper is exploring plans to supply copper concentrate sourced from Chilean state miner Codelco to domestic producers Hindalco Industries and Adani, as India seeks to secure raw materials for its expanding copper industry. Hindustan Copper, Coal India and NTPC Mining are reportedly assessing opportunities involving four copper mining blocks held by Codelco in Chile. Hindustan Copper signed a preliminary cooperation agreement with Codelco in 2025, followed by a non-disclosure agreement in May 2026, with due diligence now underway. The move comes against a widening gap between India's copper consumption and domestic supply. India currently produces around 573,000 mt of refined copper annually, while domestic demand is estimated at approximately 1.8 million mt. Government estimates suggest that the country could eventually depend on imports for 91%-97% of its copper concentrate requirements by 2047. India has been expanding domestic copper smelting and refining capacity as electricity infrastructure, renewable energy, manufacturing and transport increase demand for the metal. However, expanding processing capacity without a corresponding increase in domestic mine supply increases the country's exposure to the international concentrate market. Securing access to Chilean resources could therefore provide Indian smelters with greater long-term supply security while reducing reliance on spot concentrate purchases. Market Impact: India's push into overseas copper resources could introduce additional competition for internationally traded concentrate at a time when mine supply growth is struggling to keep pace with expanding global smelting capacity. As India builds out its copper processing industry, its growing requirement for imported feedstock could increasingly influence Asian concentrate trade flows and competition for long-term supply contracts.

[SMM Express] The UK has introduced sanctions targeting Russian companies involved in the import of tantalum and niobium, alongside broader measures aimed at disrupting supply chains supporting Russia’s defence sector. The move reflects growing government attention to the role of strategic metals in the production of advanced military equipment, including missiles, drones and other weapons. The sanctions could increase scrutiny of Russian-linked tantalum and niobium trade flows, potentially contributing to further supply-chain fragmentation and greater demand for alternative sources. The development nevertheless reinforces the growing relationship between critical minerals, trade policy and geopolitical security.

South Africa's chrome ore exports totalled 2,403.95kt in June 2026, easing a marginal 0.90% month-on-month but still standing 38.86% higher than a year earlier — the latest data point in a trend that has defined the country's chromium sector for well over a year: raw ore volumes holding firm or growing, even as the health of domestic ferrochrome smelting remains under separate and distinct pressure. Figure 1: South Africa chrome ore export volume and destination breakdown, June 2026 A Moderating, but Still Elevated, Trend June's figure sits within a narrow band that has now persisted for three consecutive months. Exports measured 2.47 million tonnes in April and 2.43 million tonnes in May, before easing further to 2.404 million tonnes in June — a gentle, incremental decline of roughly 2.7% across the quarter. Read in isolation, that could look like softening demand. Read against the year-on-year comparison, it looks more like a plateau at an unusually high level: April, May and June 2026 volumes have all come in well above 2025's equivalent months, with year-on-year growth running as high as 43% in May and still near 39% in June. In other words, the market has not cooled — it has simply stopped accelerating after an extended period of outsized growth. China's Grip on the Trade Tightens Further China absorbed 67.61% of South Africa's total June export volume, reaffirming its position as by far the largest buyer of South African chrome ore. That concentration is consistent with — and arguably an intensification of — the pattern seen through 2025, when China absorbed a record 12.5 million tonnes of South African chrome ore across the full year, up 23.8% year-on-year, driven by high operating rates at Chinese ferrochrome smelters feeding the country's stainless steel industry. With Chinese buyers taking more than two-thirds of a single month's exports, South Africa's chrome ore trade is now more dependent than ever on the health of one downstream market: Chinese ferrochrome production and, by extension, Chinese stainless steel demand. That concentration cuts both ways — it has underpinned South Africa's export volumes through a period of domestic smelting weakness, but it also leaves the country's ore exporters unusually exposed to any slowdown in Chinese furnace utilisation or stainless steel output. Singapore and the UAE: Trading Gateways, Not End-Use Markets Singapore (7.85%) and the UAE (7.82%) rounded out the top three destinations in June, together accounting for close to a sixth of total export volume. Neither country is a meaningful chrome ore consumer or ferrochrome producer in its own right; both are established global commodity trading and logistics hubs. The UAE in particular is widely positioned — including in the government's own economic development literature — as a re-export and re-distribution gateway to the wider Middle East and African markets, leveraging its logistics infrastructure rather than domestic industrial demand. Singapore plays a broadly similar role in Asian commodity trading flows. Their appearance in the top three is therefore best read as a signal of trading and blending activity — ore passing through intermediary hubs before final delivery — rather than genuine new demand centres competing with China for South African tonnage. The Structural Story Underneath the Numbers The persistence of strong ore exports alongside continued weakness in South Africa's own ferrochrome smelting capacity reflects a structural realignment in the country's chromium value chain rather than a short-term fluctuation. High grid electricity costs, an ageing domestic furnace fleet, and persistent logistics bottlenecks have steadily eroded the competitiveness of local beneficiation, encouraging producers to route an increasing share of mined chrome toward raw-ore export instead. That dynamic was starkly illustrated at the company level in Merafe Resources' H1 2026 production report, released in late July, which showed attributable ferrochrome production collapsing 75% to just 28,000 tonnes on extended smelter suspensions at Wonderkop and Boshoek, while chrome ore production held almost steady at 425,000 tonnes — the ore side of the business continuing to perform even as the alloy side went largely idle. At the same time, South Africa's supply base for chrome ore is arguably broadening rather than narrowing, even as dedicated ferrochrome capacity struggles. Several major platinum group metals producers — Sibanye-Stillwater, Northam Platinum, Eastplats, and project developer Southern Palladium at its Bengwenyama development — have all disclosed plans or results this year showing deliberate growth in chromite by-product recovery from their UG2 orebodies, treating chrome increasingly as a strategic parallel revenue stream rather than an incidental credit. That PGM-sector diversification adds a further source of tonnage to the ore-export pool, reinforcing the same pattern visible in the national trade data: more ore reaching the market, less of it being converted to ferrochrome domestically before it leaves the country. A Policy Response Still Working Through the System This is not an unnoticed trend within South Africa. In June 2025, Cabinet approved a coordinated set of interventions specifically aimed at curbing this shift — including realigning electricity tariffs for the ferrochrome industry, placing chrome ore under export control requiring an ITAC-administered export permit, and developing a chrome ore export tax alongside expanded Special Economic Zone incentives for smelters. The Department of Trade, Industry and Competition subsequently opened the export-tax and permitting framework for public comment in November 2025. More than six months on, June's trade data — still showing raw ore exports running nearly 39% above year-ago levels — suggests that whatever combination of permitting and tariff relief has been implemented so far has not yet meaningfully redirected material away from export and back into domestic beneficiation. Whether the fuller export tax framework, once finalised, changes that balance is likely to be one of the more consequential open questions for South Africa's chrome value chain over the remainder of 2026. Bottom Line June's export data confirms that South Africa's chrome ore trade remains structurally tilted toward raw shipments rather than domestic beneficiation, with China's share of that trade deepening rather than diversifying, and Singapore and the UAE functioning as trading conduits rather than genuine alternative markets. With PGM producers adding to the ore supply base even as ferrochrome smelters remain constrained, and government's export-control measures still working through implementation, the divergence between chrome ore and ferrochrome trade flows looks set to remain a defining feature of South Africa's chromium sector through the rest of 2026.

The Southeast Asian secondary aluminum market remained broadly stable this week. Aluminum scrap prices moved within a narrow range, while ADC12 domestic prices were largely unchanged and FOB offers edged higher on firm raw material costs. Meanwhile, imported aluminum scrap prices in China continued to rebound as import margins improved, with several cargoes reportedly scheduled to arrive in mid-August, providing additional support to market sentiment.

【SMM Tungsten Analysis】 SMM August 6: On August 5, major Chinese tungsten enterprises released their long-term contract prices for the first half of August, among which the price for 55% wolframite concentrates was set at 412,000 yuan/mt, up 1,000 yuan/standard tonne from the second half of July, and the APT long-term contract price was simultaneously raised by 1,000 yuan/mt to 606,000 yuan/mt.