Tellurium: Correlation
Prices it moves with, and why
Tellurium is recovered from the anode slimes of copper refineries, so supply follows copper refining, mainly in China, Japan and Russia. Cadmium telluride solar panels and bismuth telluride thermoelectric devices drive demand.
No public price Tellurium has no public monthly price series: Tiny by-product market priced privately; no public series.What its price moves with
Copper electrorefining leaves anode slimes containing tellurium, selenium and precious metals, and that is where almost all tellurium comes from. Supply grows only as fast as copper refining and recovery capacity.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Cadmium telluride thin-film panels, made mainly by First Solar in the US, India and Malaysia, are now tellurium's largest use. Their growth drives demand and gives the maker reason to secure supply.
No public price for solar photovoltaics, so the link is explained in words only.Cadmium telluride combines the two metals, so thin-film solar output links them, and both are by-products of base metal refining: cadmium of zinc, tellurium of copper. Neither supply responds to its own price.
No public price for cadmium, so the link is explained in words only.Selenium and tellurium are recovered from the same copper anode slimes, so their supply rises and falls together with copper refining. Their markets differ: selenium serves glass, manganese and agriculture.
No public price for selenium, so the link is explained in words only.Bismuth telluride is the main thermoelectric material for solid-state cooling and heat recovery modules, so growth in thermoelectrics pulls on both metals. This use is small but growing in cars, lasers and sensors.
No public price for bismuth, so the link is explained in words only.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.