Guangxi Yusheng Germanium Industry to Hold Public Tender for Germanium Products on the 31st [SMM Report]

[SMM Tantalum Flash] Aterian’s interim results, released on 30 September, show £1.341 million of Tantalum and other ore-sales revenue for the six months to 30 June 2026, up from £20,000 a year earlier. Gross profit was £522,000, while the group recorded a £568,000 pre-tax loss. Its Rwanda trading business deployed about US$2.18 million in working capital through joint-venture purchases. Management valued potential sales from those purchases at US$2.78 million, but cautioned that the notional valuation is not additional recognised revenue. The implied US$602,000 gross trading profit is also a management estimate, dependent on completed sales, assays, realised prices, costs and the joint venture’s profit allocation. Aterian said traceability inspections limited suppliers and volumes. It held £131,000 in cash at 30 June; its expectation of expanding trading volumes from the fourth quarter still depends on execution and funding.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo remains the world’s leading tantalum producer. The harmonised 2025 statistics used for this analysis report 1,434.17 tonnes of coltan, with 88.1% attributed to artisanal mining. They also reveal a supply chain concentrated in a few provinces and firms, wide export unit-value differences and official totals that do not fully agree. The central issue is therefore not only how much Congo produces, but how well each tonne is recorded from mine to export.

[SMM Tantalum Flash] Sinomine Resources said a groundbreaking ceremony for a second tantalum-niobium recovery plant took place at its Bikita operation in Zimbabwe on 25 September. The company says the plant is designed to treat 450,000 tonnes of ore a year and produce 500–600 tonnes of combined tantalum-niobium concentrate annually. It expects construction and commissioning in 2027; those volumes are design targets, not current output. The project would expand recovery of critical metals associated with Bikita’s lithium operation and add processing capacity in Zimbabwe. Sinomine plans to use magnetic separation and shaking tables to extract tantalum-niobium concentrate from lithium concentrate. The ceremony marks the project’s launch; completed construction, actual throughput and recovered volumes remain to be demonstrated.