Scandium Oxide

An open letter to those selling scandium oxide.

(Sorry for the little intrusion of work blogging here folks).

Gentlemen,

Someone out there in Russia or the CIS is trying to sell off a stock of scandium oxide (or Sc2O3 if you prefer).

13 tonnes of it in fact. I’m pretty sure I know which warehouse that material is coming from, where and when it was extracted and so on. The existence of this material is not a big secret.

I have been offered it twice in the past couple of weeks. At wildly different prices. For the gentlemen who offered it to me at $300 per gramme, my apologies, but you are deluded. Your price is out by at least three orders of magnitude. (Think this through. You are asking for more than $3 billion dollars for a truckload of metal oxide. Think how much mining I could do with $3 billion.)

The other gentlemen, while their price was more reasonable, failed to take account of a very important fact. The whole wide world does not use 13 tonnes of scandium oxide in a year. Far from it, much less. When you offer for sale several year’s worth of global consumption of something it is normal for the price to be a discount to the prevailing market, not a premium. Most especially at a discount to the price we currently pay for exactly the same material, from the same warehouse, in the smaller quantities that we use it in, delivered to us when and where we want it.

So, while closer, still no cigar.

Yes, I know what is happening here. Someone is trying to sell this material and they are employing various dealers to try and place it for them. So there are now endless numbers of commodity dealers, brokers, chancers and the rest all scrambling to find out what they can about the market for scandium oxide. And most of them are going to end up talking to me at some point. For, sad as it may be to have to tell people this, we as an organization handle a large percentage of the world’s usage of Sc2O3. We’re not just one of those small number who know what it actually is, we’re one of the even smaller number who actually know what to do with it.

Yes, we’re even eager buyers of that material. All 13 tonnes of it. Yes, we’ll happily purchase several year’s global usage. At, it must be pointed out, the right price.

No, $3 million per kilo isn’t the right price. Nor is $3 million per tonne. Nor for 10 tonnes.

So why write all this for the public internets? So that those people in the network trying to sell it, as and when they peruse Google, will find it, at least I hope they will, and I’ll not have to waste time on the "but what’s your price?" "no, no, what’s your’s?" dance before finding out that someone’s lost touch with reality.

So if you’re one of those trying to sell this material, yes, please, do contact me. But can you remember, please, that the major market for this material is in bicycle frames? And price it accordingly? It just isn’t as valuable as you seem to think it is.

(Anyone who wants to link to this using the root phrase "scandium oxide", well, please do. Getting that little rant onto the first page will save me a lot of typing in the future.)