What Uses Indium?
· ₹69,296.24/kg today
The invisible layer on almost every touchscreen and flat display on Earth — and a metal that exists commercially only because someone else was mining zinc.
What Uses Indium?
Detailed application mapping is currently being developed for Indium. In the meantime, see the metal profile for who buys it and which industries depend on it.
The Metal Inside Every Touchscreen
Indium tin oxide (ITO) forms the transparent, conductive coating that makes touchscreens and LCD/OLED displays work at all — there's no widely-deployed substitute that matches its combination of transparency and conductivity, which keeps indium demand tightly linked to global display manufacturing output.
A Byproduct of Zinc, Not Its Own Mine
Like gallium, indium is recovered almost entirely as a byproduct of zinc ore refining rather than mined directly — China dominates that refining step, while the display panels it ends up in are overwhelmingly built in South Korea, Japan and China's own electronics factories.
Recycling Happens at the Factory, Not the Landfill
A large share of the indium consumed in display manufacturing never actually ends up on a finished screen — it's left over as spent sputtering-target material during the coating process, and specialized recyclers now recover the large majority of that leftover indium and tin for reuse. Manufacturing scrap, not old phones, is the real backbone of indium recycling today.
Did You Know?
Indium's total annual global supply is small enough that a single major refinery outage can noticeably tighten the market — a scale of fragility copper or aluminium simply doesn't have.
Frequently Asked Questions
Detailed use-case data for Indium is not yet available on this page.
The Indium price in India today is ₹69,296.24 per kilogram as of August 28, 2026. See the live price and chart.
Metal Applications™ is an informational reference built from public data and named sources. See the methodology page for how figures are sourced and confidence-rated.
