The Silicon Nobody Will File Against

Commerce opened another silicon metal review on Thursday morning. The order list it belongs to now runs to ten countries.

China since 1991. Russia since 2003.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland and Kazakhstan since April 2021, Malaysia since that August, and all four renewed for another five years on September 3.

Angola and Laos since April 16. Australia and Norway since August 21.

That is close to a clean sweep of the places that sell America silicon.

And imported tonnes went up.

"If ten origins carry an order and the volume did not fall, who is actually shipping the silicon?"

January through July the United States took 104,881 tonnes on HS 2804.69, against 101,556 in the same months of 2025. Up 3.3 percent.

The ten covered origins gave up 10,877 tonnes between them, and two countries absorbed 16,122 (chart below).

The Rate Is the Whole Story

The cash deposit rates, and what each one did to the volume:

• Angola, 68.45 percent on adverse facts available. Zero tonnes in every month of 2026, and its last recorded kilo on this line was June 2025, three months before the preliminary determination that first made anyone post a deposit.
• Laos, 94.44 percent, also on adverse facts. Zero, same shape.
• Norway, 2.47 percent. Down 39 percent, from 11,077 tonnes to 6,748.
• Australia, 6.16 percent. Up 3 percent.

So the response function has a cliff in it. Under ten points a deposit is a cost of doing business and goes into your price; above sixty it is an exit, and the exit happens on the petition rather than the order.

Worth knowing before you assume a pending case clears a competitor off your bid list.

One honest caveat on the data: the orders reach material generally at or above 96 percent silicon, and the public six-digit line carries lower-purity tonnes that sit outside most of those scopes. It runs a little wide.

The direction is not in question.