Last week, US President Donald Trump hosted a resource industry roundtable at the US State Department.
The US Government is prepared to invest billions of dollars to advance critical mineral projects in the name of US supply chain security and non-Chinese supply for the US defence industry.
One of these essential minerals is indium. This is one of those obscure, niche but vital minerals that the Trump government is targeting.
Most people likely interact with one of its use cases every day via the touchscreen on their smartphones or tablet. Indium is also used in semiconductors, data centres, solar panels, and other smart glass applications.
These are major structural growth drivers of the global economy and are expected to push indium demand higher indefinitely.
That gives the Trump administration a major headache, because this is a complicated dynamic for the US to increase access to indium supply.
China is estimated to control 70% of global indium refining. South Korea and Japan also produce some indium, leaving Canada as the only large producer in the entire Western hemisphere.
That’s not all. Most indium is produced as a small byproduct of zinc mining and refining.
That means the zinc price plays the most important role in the indium market. It’s the profitability of this mining sector that drives indium production forward.
There is some good news for Trump
Most resource investors don’t consider zinc a ‘critical mineral’. That said, they will likely become more interested if the zinc price continues to trend higher.
It’s up 30% in the last 12 months.
The higher price is supporting good margins for producers such as South32 (ASX:S32). The company has a favourable assessment of the outlook too.
South32 is investing US$3.3 billion ($4.7 billion) to bring its Taylor Zinc-Lead-Silver Project in Arizona, US, into production by 2028. The company’s management would only allocate this large amount of capital after a rigorous assessment of the market fundamentals.
One feature of zinc mines is they can be ‘polymetallic’. That means the deposit formed with other minerals, often silver and lead, which can provide multiple revenue streams for mining companies. Higher silver prices can therefore provide a second revenue tailwind for a zinc producer.
Higher zinc and silver prices can also make a prospective project’s Feasibility Study more compelling. In turn, this can lead to higher indium production as a byproduct if these elevated resource margins continue.
That’s good news for companies in the development space.
One of those is Tinka Resources (TSX-V:TK). Its project is called Ayawilca and is located in Peru. It’s polymetallic too. In this case, zinc-silver-tin, with indium as well.
Tinka says that the Ayawilca Project is the biggest zinc discovery in Peru in the last 30 years. It’s conducting drilling in the second half of 2026 to advance to a Prefeasibility Study.
This is the type of project that the Trump administration is trying to encourage into development.
The message from the market is also clear. Prices for all three major metals at Ayawilca — silver, tin, and zinc — are higher in 2026 than in 2025. This is a very favourable industry backdrop for a pre-development project like Ayawilca.
If sustained, these higher prices could allow future Scoping or Feasibility studies like Tinka’s to project a higher lifetime value for the project. The potential indium production also brings in critical mineral-focused investors and could attract US Government support.
The Ayawilca Project is located in Peru, which falls within the US sphere of influence now dubbed the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ after the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th century. Under Trump, the foreign policy stakes US hegemony over the region and as a source of raw materials for the US economy.
It’s reasonable to expect Western capital to continue to invest in South America as the mining expansion continues.
Write to Callum Newman at Mining.com.au
Images: Unsplash
