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Gallium Price — 10-Day Trend Behind the Byproduct Supply
All prices in ₹ per gram · daily rate, updated once per day
Why There's No Such Thing as a Gallium Mine
Ask a mining geologist to point you toward a gallium deposit and you'll get a puzzled look. It doesn't exist — not in any commercially meaningful sense. Gallium is recovered as a byproduct during the Bayer process, the standard industrial method refiners use to turn bauxite ore into alumina, the raw material later smelted into aluminium metal. A smaller share also comes out of zinc ore processing. Either way, nobody digs a hole in the ground specifically chasing gallium; it shows up as a bonus recovery inside someone else's refining operation.
That has a real, practical consequence: gallium has no retail bullion market at all, no coin and no bar, and its supply doesn't respond to its own price signal the way a directly mined metal's would. Today's reference rate works out to:
- Per gram: ₹22.98
- Per 10 grams: ₹229.83
- Per 100 grams: ₹2,298.26
- Per kilogram: ₹22,982.64
Gallium Price by Weight
Today's Gallium rate is Twenty Three Rupees per gram. At this rate, 10 grams of Gallium costs Two Hundred and Thirty Rupees.
| Unit | Weight | Price (INR) | Price in Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Gram | 1.0000 g | ₹22.98 | Twenty Three Rupees |
| 8 Grams | 8.0000 g | ₹183.86 | One Hundred and Eighty Four Rupees |
| 10 Grams | 10.0000 g | ₹229.83 | Two Hundred and Thirty Rupees |
| 100 Grams | 100.0000 g | ₹2,298.26 | Two Thousand Two Hundred and Ninety Eight Rupees |
| 1 Kilogram | 1,000.0000 g | ₹22,982.64 | Twenty Two Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty Three Rupees |
| 1 Ounce (oz) | 28.3495 g | ₹651.55 | Six Hundred and Fifty Two Rupees |
| 1 Troy Ounce | 31.1035 g | ₹714.84 | Seven Hundred and Fifteen Rupees |
| 1 Metric Ton | 1,000,000.0000 g | ₹22,982,641.00 | Two Crore Twenty Nine Lakh Eighty Two Thousand Six Hundred and Forty One Rupees |
Inside the Bayer Process: How Gallium Actually Gets Made
Bauxite ore carries only trace amounts of gallium — nowhere near enough to be worth mining for on its own. What makes recovery worthwhile is scale: refiners process enormous volumes of bauxite to get their aluminium, and gallium comes along for the ride at almost no extra mining cost. The mechanism itself is straightforward chemistry, even if the economics behind it took decades to make commercially sensible.
| Stage of the Bayer Process | What Happens to the Gallium |
|---|---|
| Bauxite ore is mined and delivered to the refinery | Present only in trace amounts, invisible without lab analysis |
| Digestion in hot caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) | Most of the gallium dissolves into the process liquor along with the aluminium |
| Alumina precipitation, liquor recycled and reused | Gallium stays dissolved rather than precipitating out; its concentration builds up over repeated cycles |
| Gallium recovery, once concentration is economically worthwhile | Extracted from the liquor via electrolysis, solvent extraction, or ion-exchange methods |
| Bauxite residue ("red mud") disposal | A portion of the original gallium is not recovered and leaves the process here instead |
Why refiners don't recover every last gram
Recovering gallium from that recycled liquor isn't free — it takes dedicated extraction equipment and a concentration high enough to justify running it. Not every alumina refinery bothers. Some simply let their gallium ride out with the residue because the volumes at their particular plant, or the gallium price at the time, don't clear the bar for building separate recovery capacity. That's the quiet reason gallium supply can lag even when demand for chips built from it is climbing: someone has to decide the byproduct is worth chasing before more of it reaches the market.
Gallium Price — Last 10 Days
The most recent Gallium price on record (2026-09-17) is Twenty Three Rupees per gram. This is up by Less than One Rupees from the previous day's rate of ₹22.94.
| Date | Price (INR/g) | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-17 | ₹22.98 | +0.05 |
| 2026-09-16 | ₹22.94 | +0.01 |
| 2026-09-15 | ₹22.93 | +0.03 |
| 2026-09-14 | ₹22.90 | -0.16 |
| 2026-09-13 | ₹23.06 | +0.00 |
| 2026-09-12 | ₹23.06 | +0.01 |
| 2026-09-11 | ₹23.04 | -0.01 |
| 2026-09-10 | ₹23.06 | +0.12 |
| 2026-09-09 | ₹22.94 | +0.09 |
| 2026-09-08 | ₹22.85 | — |
The Short, Honest Bridge to China
This page is about mechanism, not geopolitics, but the two connect in one obvious place worth stating plainly: China refines a very large share of the world's alumina. Because gallium recovery is tethered to alumina output, that scale alone hands Chinese refiners more raw liquor to extract gallium from than most other countries can match, independent of any separate policy decision. The 2023 export-licensing controls China placed on gallium are a genuinely different story — a deliberate trade-policy action layered on top of this production advantage, not a description of the production advantage itself. The site's why China controls gallium supply page covers that policy side in full.
For anyone weighing exposure to this story, the byproduct mechanism is also why gallium doesn't behave like a normal commodity investment. There's no bullion route in — real exposure runs through aluminium producers, materials refiners, and the semiconductor companies buying the finished gallium, not through owning the metal itself. Demand from chipmakers could keep pulling on this byproduct supply chain in the years ahead, but how that plays out for price is not something this page will forecast; see what affects gallium price for the fuller set of factors at work.
Gallium as a Byproduct of Aluminium — FAQs
No. There is no dedicated gallium mine anywhere in the world. Gallium is recovered as a byproduct of refining bauxite — aluminium ore — into alumina, and to a lesser extent from zinc ore processing. Production tracks the aluminium and zinc industries' own refining decisions rather than any gallium-specific extraction plan.
The Bayer process is the standard industrial method for converting bauxite ore into alumina, the raw material smelted into aluminium metal. Bauxite is digested in hot caustic soda, and most of the gallium naturally present in the ore dissolves into that solution alongside the aluminium, rather than staying behind in the solid waste. That dissolved gallium is what refiners eventually recover, separately from the alumina itself.
Bauxite ore carries only trace amounts of gallium to begin with, and process-chemistry literature indicates that a majority of it follows the aluminium into solution during digestion, while some is lost with the leftover bauxite residue. Refiners recover gallium from the aluminium-refining liquor once it has built up to an economically worthwhile concentration through repeated recycling — not from every batch, and not at 100% efficiency.
Both, though bauxite-derived gallium via the Bayer process is the larger and more commonly cited source. A smaller share of global gallium is recovered from zinc ore processing instead, using different extraction chemistry. Either way, the pattern is the same: gallium rides along with a different metal's primary refining process rather than being extracted on its own.
China operates a very large share of the world's alumina refining capacity, and because gallium recovery is tied directly to how much bauxite gets processed into alumina, that scale gives China's refiners more raw material to recover gallium from than most other countries have access to. That's a production-mechanism explanation, distinct from the separate story of China's 2023 export-licensing controls — see the site's why China controls gallium supply page for that policy angle specifically.
Yes, structurally. Because gallium supply is tied to aluminium refining volumes rather than its own dedicated mining economics, today's reference rate of ₹22.98 per gram, as of September 17, 2026, reflects a market that can't simply expand output by opening a new mine the way a directly mined metal could.
