BI & Market
Research

United Metals tracks commodity prices across all major global exchanges and trade publications — LME, SMM (Shanghai Metals Market), SHFE, LBMA, Metal Bulletin, and Fastmarkets — to deliver continuous price monitoring across antimony, copper, tin, gold, lithium, nickel, and chromium. We correlate exchange prices with physical spot market premiums and discounts, providing clients with a complete picture of where metal is actually trading, not just where contracts are settled.

Our price intelligence service tracks treatment charges (TC/RC), benchmark premiums, freight differentials, and currency impacts — the variables that determine landed cost and smelter margins, and which are systematically absent from standard market reports.

Understanding where metal flows, who controls the chokepoints, and how trade policy shifts redirect supply is the defining competitive advantage in critical minerals trading. United Metals analyses bilateral trade data, customs filings, port statistics, and logistics intelligence across our seven-country operational footprint — mapping origin-to-destination flows for each metal we cover.

With China controlling 48–70% of global antimony production and implementing export license requirements for antimony and related products since September 2024, understanding the precise impact on supply availability, pricing, and alternative source activation has never been more commercially critical. Our trade analytics deliver exactly this — country-level, near-real-time.

The energy transition is reshaping demand for every metal we cover — lithium and nickel for battery chemistries, copper for grid and EV infrastructure, antimony for next-generation energy storage and defence applications. United Metals tracks demand evolution across the five key end-use sectors — energy storage, defence, electronics, construction, and industrial — providing forward-looking demand curves that incorporate announced capacity commitments, policy incentives, and technology substitution trends.

We align our forecasting with the most respected publicly available data sources — IEA, USGS, World Bank, IMF commodity forecasts — and layer in proprietary physical market intelligence from our own operational networks.

Commodity markets are increasingly shaped by geopolitical decisions, resource nationalism, and export control regimes — not just supply and demand fundamentals. United Metals monitors the policy and regulatory environment across all seven of its operating territories and the major producing and consuming nations — providing clients with early warning of export restrictions, critical mineral designations, tariff changes, and sanctions developments that will impact pricing and supply availability.

Our geopolitical intelligence draws on direct in-country operational networks in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, DRC, Sierra Leone, India, and Mexico — giving clients qualitative intelligence that no satellite-based market monitoring service can provide.