SHFE tin prices opened slightly higher in the night session and fluctuated with a pullback, while trading in the spot market remained sluggish. [SMM Tin Morning News]

SMM Tin Morning Brief on December 22, 2025:

Futures: The most-traded SHFE tin contract (SN2601) opened slightly higher during the night session, fluctuated, and pulled back after breaking through the 340,000 mark, closing at 340,100 yuan/mt, up 0.37% from the previous trading day.

Macro: (1) According to the China Securities Regulatory Commission website, Xinhe Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd. and its sponsoring broker CITIC Securities submitted a completion report of the counseling work to the Shanghai Securities Regulatory Bureau. After counseling, CITIC Securities believes that the counseled object has established the corporate governance structure, accounting foundation, and internal control system required for a publicly listed firm, and fully understands the characteristics and attributes of various tiers in the multi-level capital market; the counseled object and its directors, senior managers, shareholders holding more than 5% of shares, and actual controllers have comprehensively mastered laws, regulations, and rules related to issuance, listing, and standardized operations, are aware of their responsibilities and obligations regarding information disclosure and fulfillment of commitments, and have developed a sense of integrity, self-discipline, and rule of law for entering the securities market. (2) It was learned from Shanghai Jiao Tong University that the university's researchers recently made a breakthrough in the field of next-generation optical computing chips, achieving for the first time an all-optical computing chip that supports large-scale semantic media generation models. The related results were published in the journal Science on December 19. "So-called optical computing can be understood as allowing light to propagate within the chip instead of electrons running in transistors, using changes in the optical field to complete computations. Light inherently possesses advantages of high speed and parallelism, thus regarded as an important direction to break through the bottlenecks of computing power and energy consumption," said Chen Yitong, the paper's author and assistant professor at the School of Integrated Circuits of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, adding that applying optical computing to generative AI is not straightforward, as existing all-optical computing chips are mainly limited to small-scale classification tasks, and optoelectronic cascading or multiplexing would severely weaken the speed of optical computing. Enabling next-generation optical computing chips to run complex generative models is a globally recognized challenge in the field of intelligent computing.

Fundamentals: (1) Supply side: Most smelters are expected to maintain relatively stable production in December. (2) Demand side: Downstream procurement remains cautious, with high prices significantly suppressing actual consumption.

Spot market: High prices significantly suppress demand: Demand in traditional sectors such as consumer electronics and home appliances continues to be weak. Despite significant price fluctuations, trading activity in the spot market remains relatively sluggish, characterized by "price without market." Faced with high tin prices, the purchase willingness of downstream enterprises is generally suppressed. Apart from necessary rigid demand, most companies choose to adopt a wait-and-see attitude, with few actual procurement activities. Even when prices fall and trading recovers somewhat, overall social inventory continues to show a buildup trend.

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