Manganese — lumpy, fines and sinter feed for the alloy industry

Why manganese matters

Roughly 90% of world manganese production goes into steelmaking, where it removes oxygen and sulphur from the melt and adds strength and hardenability to the finished product. There is no commercial substitute. Every tonne of crude steel made anywhere in the world consumes between six and nine kilograms of manganese, and no steelmaker has ever found a way around it.

The remaining 10% goes into aluminium alloys, chemicals and, increasingly, battery cathode chemistry. Lithium-manganese-rich cathode formulations are a genuine growth avenue but they require high-purity manganese sulphate rather than metallurgical ore, and that is a different product with a different processing route. Quintel does not currently produce battery-grade material and will not claim exposure to a market it does not serve.

Product range

Gamagara ore is prized for low phosphorus; Nyanga ore for high manganese content. The two are frequently blended by customers to hit a target specification.

Production record

Selling manganese

Manganese ore is sold on a contained-unit basis: the price is quoted per dry metric tonne unit, meaning one percent of manganese in one tonne of ore. A cargo of 44% material therefore prices at 44 units per tonne, which is why grade discipline matters more in this business than in almost any other bulk commodity.

Around 81% of group manganese is committed under contracts of one year or longer to ferroalloy smelters in China, India, Norway, Ukraine and South Korea. The remainder is sold on spot terms, principally to maintain price discovery and to place off-specification material.

Freight is a large share of delivered cost for both operations, and the two mines have very different logistics profiles: Gamagara is rail-constrained and Nyanga is rail-dependent but with spare port capacity. That difference means the assets rarely suffer the same disruption at the same time, which is a large part of why the group holds both.