The EU mines no antimony. It imports the metal and exports trioxide.

The EU has no antimony mine and makes almost no antimony metal, yet it is one of the world's larger exporters of antimony trioxide. It buys metal, mostly from Tajikistan, converts it, and in 2025 sent half of its oxide exports to the United States.

A map of the bloc's civilian antimony trade, and of an export flow increasingly crossing the Atlantic.

No antimony is mined in the EU. The European Commission's Joint Research Centre records no extraction in any member state and puts the bloc's reliance on imported antimony ore at 100 per cent. Metal production is negligible too: about 164 tonnes a year on the centre's averages for 2019 to 2023, against imports of about 19,000 tonnes.

Yet over the same period the EU produced about 28,000 tonnes of antimony oxides a year. The gap between those two facts is the whole business model. Europe imports antimony as metal and oxidises it into trioxide. About three-quarters of the trioxide the EU made in those years was used at home. The rest is exported, in larger volumes than the oxide the bloc imports, which is what makes it a net exporter. It is a conversion trade, and its main markets are civilian: flame retardants for plastics and textiles, catalysts for PET production, and additives for glass and ceramics.

Those averages describe the structure of the trade. Eurostat's Comext database records the trade itself year by year. In trade with countries outside the EU:

Gross product weight. A tonne of antimony trioxide contains about 835 kilogrammes of antimony against close to a tonne in unwrought metal, so the oxide and metal rows cannot be added or compared directly. Source: Eurostat Comext.

Metal is the main input, and almost none of it leaves again in its current form. Where it enters has changed. Belgium was the largest importer on the 2019 to 2023 averages. In 2025 the Netherlands took the most from outside the EU, 7,057 tonnes, ahead of France at 6,323 tonnes and Belgium at 3,805 tonnes. The Netherlands is a trading hub rather than a user. The customs data records countries, not ports, but Rotterdam is where Europe's antimony market trades: benchmark prices are assessed in-warehouse Rotterdam, and Asian exporters quote for delivery there. Almost all the metal entering the Netherlands moves on, with Dutch exports of antimony metal to other member states reaching about 6,700 tonnes in 2025. Other member states reported shipping 5,545 tonnes to Belgium, though Belgium's own figures record far less arriving from within the EU, a gap common in intra-EU trade data. The route has changed; the converters at the end of it, in Belgium and France, largely have not.

Tajikistan dominates the metal supply. It provided 57 per cent of EU metal imports by weight in 2025, followed by Vietnam at 15 per cent and Myanmar, whose shipments rose sixfold in a year, at 10 per cent. China has almost disappeared as a metal supplier: its share fell from 40 per cent in 2020, on the Joint Research Centre's figures, to 18 per cent in 2023 and under 1 per cent in 2025.

Unwrought antimony and powders, gross weight. Source: Eurostat Comext.

Country of origin is not the same as ownership. Tibet Huayu Mining owns Tajikistan's Kangqiao mine outright and half of TALCO Gold, which works the Konchoch gold-antimony deposits and in July 2026 commissioned a plant able to make up to 5,000 tonnes of antimony metal a year. Anzob, which works the Dzhizhikrut deposit, has been wholly owned by the US-based Comsup Commodities since 2006. Customs data cannot say which mine stands behind a Tajik shipment.

Ore sits outside the figures above, under a customs code of its own, and is a minor stream by comparison. EU imports from outside the bloc ran between 1,069 and 1,901 tonnes a year from 2019 to 2025, and came to 1,645 tonnes in 2025. Türkiye supplied 1,462 tonnes of that, or 89 per cent, up from a third in 2019, while China and Bolivia, significant suppliers that year, have all but stopped shipping ore to the EU. Italy took 1,387 tonnes, or 84 per cent, down from all of it in 2023. Türkiye has several producers. Eti Bakır's Halıköy mine accounts for roughly a third of the country's output, alongside Lepoteknik in Kütahya and Balıkesir and Ozdemir Antimuan at Turhal. The trade data does not say which of them supplies the EU.

EU producers make most of their trioxide by oxidising metal rather than roasting stibnite. Oxidising metal, the Joint Research Centre says, delivers the purity industrial customers require. The bloc's oxide imports, 3,225 tonnes in 2025, came mainly from China, South Korea and Bolivia, which supplied 37, 31 and 16 per cent respectively, and topped up domestic supply rather than underpinning it.

The surplus goes abroad, and since 2023 it has gone further and faster. EU oxide exports outside the bloc doubled from 6,262 tonnes in 2023 to 12,809 tonnes in 2025. Belgium and France supplied 91 per cent of the 2025 total, with Belgium alone shipping 7,520 tonnes.

The customers changed with the volume. In 2019 the United States took 31 per cent of EU oxide exports, the United Kingdom 21 per cent and Türkiye 6 per cent. Over the next four years Türkiye overtook the United Kingdom, before the United States pulled away in 2024 and 2025:

Source: Eurostat Comext.

By 2025 the United States took half, and the value of those shipments rose from €19m to €291m, driven by price as much as by volume. Japan, which had bought between 205 and 556 tonnes a year since 2019, became the second market. Türkiye, which ranked behind only the United States in 2023, took 1,623 tonnes in 2024, its highest in the period, before falling to 793 tonnes in 2025, while the United Kingdom slipped to 627 tonnes.

Until China restricted its antimony exports in 2024, the United States leaned heavily on it. It supplied 79 per cent of US antimony oxide imports in 2020, 75 per cent in 2021 and 74 per cent in 2023, with Belgium a distant second at 10 to 12 per cent. The opening widened in 2025, when China's own antimony oxide exports fell 80.6 per cent to 5,898 tonnes on Chinese customs data. The timing fits. China brought antimony under export licensing in September 2024 and, from December, barred its export to the United States outright, a ban it suspended in November 2025. American buyers had relied on China for about three-quarters of their oxide imports. Meanwhile, EU shipments to the United States nearly doubled in 2024 and again in 2025. Europe did not fill the gap alone: US oxide imports roughly tripled between 2023 and 2025 on United States Geological Survey estimates, and some Chinese material kept arriving by way of Thailand and Mexico. Campine, the Belgian producer, said the disruption let it significantly expand its trioxide exports, strengthening its position as the world's leading producer.

There are signs that the demand behind that trade is now falling. Campine reported that its antimony trioxide volumes fell 23 per cent in the first half of 2026 against the same period of 2025, after the high prices of 2025 led customers to reduce consumption or turn to alternatives. The antimony metal price that sets trioxide prices fell from about $60,000 a tonne in mid-2025 to about $23,000 a tonne at the end of June 2026. Campine's flame retardant masterbatch volumes rose 12 per cent over the same half, on demand for solutions using less antimony. On 8 September the company agreed to buy the Flamaway Group, a Belgian maker of flame retardant mixtures producing about 10,000 tonnes of compounds a year, and presented the deal as a diversification away from formulations built around antimony trioxide. Closing was planned for 1 October 2026.

The Joint Research Centre's own conclusion was that if European converters could secure their metal, disruption to Chinese oxide supply could boost EU exports, above all to the United States. EU oxide exports doubled between 2023 and 2025, and half went to the United States, as that analysis anticipated. The EU's antimony trade is a conversion business: metal mainly from Tajikistan and ore from Türkiye, American and, increasingly, Japanese customers, and a margin set by the metal price. Its open question for 2026 is not supply but demand, and whether customers who learned to use less antimony at $60,000 a tonne return to it at well under half that price.