[1][2] Minor metals have a wide variety of uses, including pharmaceutical, semiconductor, automotive, glass, battery, solar and many others.
They are more difficult to extract from their naturally occurring host minerals than base metals.
[3] Recent research based on data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) indicates that China is not only the leading primary producer of minor metals, supplying about 40 percent of all production, but that China's share of global production increased 34 percent between 2000 and 2009.
[4] Minor metals are used in a wide diversity of end-use applications, from capacitors for consumer electronics (tantalum) and metallic cathodes for rechargeable batteries (cobalt) to photovoltaic solar cells (silicon) and semiconductor materials (gallium and indium).
The primary end-uses of minor metals can also help to categorize the metals into four groups:[5] Metals often classified as minor metals include: antimony (Sb), arsenic (As), beryllium (Be), bismuth (Bi), cadmium (Cd), cerium (Ce), chromium (Cr), cobalt (Co), gadolinium (Gd), gallium (Ga), germanium (Ge), hafnium (Hf), indium (In), lithium (Li), magnesium (Mg), manganese (Mn), mercury (Hg), molybdenum (Mo), neodymium (Nd), niobium (Nb), iridium (Ir), osmium (Os), praseodymium (Pr), rhenium (Re), rhodium (Rh), ruthenium (Ru), samarium (Sm), selenium (Se), silicon (Si), tantalum (Ta), tellurium (Te), titanium (Ti), tungsten (W), vanadium (V), and zirconium (Zr).