Chromium: Correlation
Prices it moves with, and why
Chrome ore comes mostly from South Africa and is smelted into ferrochrome, almost all for stainless steel. Prices depend on Chinese and Indonesian stainless output and on South African power costs and supply, as smelting is very electricity-intensive.
No public price Chromium has no public monthly price series: Ore and ferrochrome sell on private contracts; no free public price.What its price moves with
Chromium is what makes stainless steel resist rust, so stainless mill output, mostly in China and Indonesia, drives demand. General steel cycles matter less than stainless, which has its own trend tied to consumer goods and industry.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Standard stainless grades need both chromium and nickel, so mills buy them together and stainless output moves both. Cheap Indonesian nickel lowered stainless costs and helped stainless output grow, supporting chrome demand.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Ferrochrome smelting uses very large amounts of electricity, and rising South African tariffs and load shedding have closed smelters there, shifting ferrochrome output to China, which imports the ore instead.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Coke and anthracite are the reducing agents in ferrochrome furnaces, so metallurgical coal prices add to smelting costs alongside electricity. When coke is dear, margins narrow, and high-cost producers in South Africa and China are the first to cut output.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.A small share of chrome goes into chemicals such as chromium oxide pigments, leather tanning salts and plating baths, made via sodium dichromate. These uses pay a premium but are too small to set the ore price.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.How to read these numbers
Correlation of monthly changes (the number in the coloured pill) compares how much each price moved, month by month, since 2006 or the first month both series exist. It runs from −1 to +1: near +1 the two usually rise and fall in the same months, near 0 there is no link, and a negative number means they tend to move in opposite directions. Above 0.7 is strong, 0.4 to 0.7 moderate, 0.2 to 0.4 weak.
12-month changes compare year-on-year moves, which shows whether two prices share the same cycles even when the month-to-month noise differs.
Price function is a straight-line fit of the two prices on logarithmic scales: price ≈ k × (partner price)β. β is how much this price moves, in per cent, for a 1% move in the partner over the whole period, and R² is the share of the variation the fit explains. Two prices that both drift up with inflation can fit well without any real link, so read it together with the monthly correlation.
Lead or lag checks whether the monthly correlation is clearly higher when one price is shifted by 1 to 6 months.
Correlation is not cause. The reasons on each card explain the economic link; the numbers show how strongly it has shown up in prices. Proxy series are US producer price indexes or related prices and can blur the real link.
Data: World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet), October 2026; US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes, IMF primary commodity prices and US EIA prices via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, retrieved November 2026. Calculations by this site.