Beryllium annual consumption is expected to grow more than 450 tonnes per year by 2030, driven by applications such as the construction of the ITER fusion reactor (BeST, 2022). In 2021, the largest consumers of beryllium compounds were the US and the EU. In Asia-Pacific (primarily in China), the beryllium demand has increased to the volumes closer to the European level (MCGroup, 2022). Beryllium market is expected to grow considerably owing to strong demand from the computer and telecommunications infrastructure markets and the increasing automotive electronics market (MCGroup, 2022). Furthermore, demand from emerging markets in Asia and Latin America is expected to increase in upcoming years.

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Materion Brush Resources Inc. of the USA, wholly-owned subsidiary of Materion Corporation,

is the only known fully-integrated beryllium company in world and the leading producer of all forms of beryllium products. Bertrandite Ore from the company’s own mines is used at the

feedstock to produce beryllium hydroxide at the company’s Delta plant in Utah.

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The hydroxide is then used to produce beryllium metal and alloys at Elmore in Ohio, ceramic grade powder at Lorain in Ohio and strip and wire products at Reading in Pennsylvania. The Elmore plant produces finished goods for the Alloy Products and Beryllium Products businesses, as well as materials for further processing by these units and its Technical Materials Inc. subsidiary 

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In the USA, NGK Metals Corporation, Starmet and Advanced Industries International produce beryllium products using raw materials supplied by other producers. Starmet, formerly known as Nuclear Metals Inc, produces shapes from beryllium-aluminium (AlBe) alloys using the lost wax process.

 

NGK Insulators, new metals division, based in Japan, Nagoya, is one of the leading producers of beryllium-copper (CuBe) alloy castings, strip, rod, bar and plate products in the world from its 3 main plants in Japan, the USA and France.

 

The Ulba Metallurgical Plant (UMP) in Kazakhstan is the largest beryllium product manufacturer in the former Soviet Union. The plant mainly uses beryllium concentrate from mines in Russia but stopped imports in the mid 1990s, with an accumulated stock of material held at the ULBA Plant in Kazakhstan. UMP holds sufficient stocks of beryllium concentrate to allow production to continue  in the future.

 

UMP set up distributions points and is represented for decades in the EU and other countries by the Hamburg, Germany based trading company TROPAG Oscar H. Ritter Nachf. GmbH and also entertaining a distribution warehouse as Ulba-China in Shanghai to sell its beryllium and tantalum products in China and other Asian countries.