About Shanghai Metals Market

Shanghai Metals Market

Shanghai Metals Market, universally known by its initials SMM, is a Shanghai-headquartered integrated information platform for the metals and mining industry. It describes itself as a leading intelligence provider for the metals and mining industry value chain and as the most trusted price reporting agency in the metals and mining markets in China. Through its English-language platform at metal.com and its Chinese services, SMM publishes benchmark prices, analysis, news, consulting and conferences covering the full span of industrial metals, from copper and aluminium to lithium, rare earths and recycled materials.

Founding and early years

SMM was founded in 1999 in Shanghai. Its own milestone history, published on its About Us page under the heading of growing with the manufacturers since 1999, traces a steady build-out of coverage. In 2000 the service began publishing prices for lead, zinc, copper, aluminium, tin and nickel — the core non-ferrous metals that remain at the heart of its assessments. By 2004, SMM records, it had achieved the number one visit volume in its field, reflecting how quickly Chinese metals traders adopted online price information at a time when the country's metals consumption was beginning its historic expansion. In 2006 it added cobalt, lithium and nickel sulphate prices, an early move into battery-related materials that anticipated the later growth of the electric-vehicle supply chain.

Growth, merger and diversification

A significant corporate step came in 2009, when SMM merged with CBI Metal, broadening its information base. In 2013 it published its database product, formalising the structured-data side of the business alongside its prices and news. In 2014, its prices achieved a notable financial-market role when SMM benchmarks were used as the cash settlement benchmark for a copper swap at the Shanghai Clearing House, an illustration of how its spot assessments had become embedded in Chinese metals finance. The following decade was marked less by changes of ownership than by geographic and methodological expansion, as the service worked to have its Chinese benchmarks accepted by international users who trade with China but are based elsewhere.

Headquarters and global offices

SMM is headquartered in Shanghai, with domestic offices recorded in cities including Beijing, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Foshan and Yantai, as well as Shandong and Guangdong offices added in 2019. Its overseas build-out is set out in its own timeline: a Singapore office in 2017; London and four additional domestic offices in 2022; a Jakarta office in 2024; a Malaysia presence through Commodity Index Sdn. Bhd. and a Seoul office in 2025; and business desks for India, Vietnam and Zambia in 2026. Its current About Us page lists overseas subsidiaries and offices in the United Kingdom, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, with further offices in Seoul, Ho Chi Minh City, India and Lusaka. That footprint mirrors the geography of the metals trade itself, linking China's smelting and consuming centres with Southeast Asian production, African mining and London's trading community.

Price reporting and IOSCO assurance

Price reporting is SMM's defining activity. It presents itself as a completely independent third-party service organisation that does not participate in substantive transactions, acting instead as a market observer in close communication with buyers and sellers. Its published methodology states that SMM prices — daily spot metal prices and indices for Chinese and overseas markets — are formed and released strictly according to documented methodologies published on its official websites, that analysts must observe a code of business ethics, and that unreliable or unrepresentative data is excluded from assessments. In 2020 SMM completed a review against the IOSCO Principles for price reporting agencies, and its current materials state that its pricing methodologies are aligned with the IOSCO Principles and standards. SMM also commits to formal consultation on its methodologies, with advance notice of major changes, which is the governance structure international benchmark users expect.

Metals and markets covered

SMM's coverage runs from base metals, ferrous metals, precious and minor metals and rare earths to battery materials, solar and recycled materials, carbon allowances and, in its newest materials, emerging markets for compute capacity and AI tokens. It publishes prices across more than fifty metal categories, supported by supply, demand, price, inventory and cost modelling databases. The combination of traditional smelter metals with battery materials such as lithium and nickel sulphate, and with recycled and solar materials, reflects the changing composition of Chinese metals demand, in which new-energy supply chains now sit alongside construction and conventional manufacturing as price drivers.

News wire and publications

Alongside prices, SMM operates a daily news service. Its English news site, news.metal.com, publishes datelined market reports in the classic wire form — items headed, for example, "SHANGHAI, Jan. 15 (SMM)" — covering price movements, production, trade and policy. SMM provides daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports for the metals industry, and its materials refer to more than fifty annual reports on pricing, supply and demand, trade flows and policy. These publications serve readers who need not only the day's assessment but also the fundamental analysis behind it: capacity changes, operating rates, import and export flows and cost curves across the Chinese metals complex.

Data, consulting and conferences

SMM's product range extends beyond prices and news into data services, consulting and events. The company says it employs one hundred and fifty analysts across twelve offices and eleven sectors, maintaining more than one hundred and sixty thousand indicators and metrics. Its consulting work draws on the same supply-demand databases used for its published research, while its conferences — including regional events such as its Southeast Asia automotive supply chain conference, at which it launched Thailand metal and steel prices in 2025 — function both as industry gatherings and as platforms for extending its benchmark coverage into new markets. The Thailand launch illustrated SMM's model clearly: it argued that Thailand lacked an independent third-party price reporting platform and a unified, credible price reference, and offered its own assessments, with inquiry channels across its Chinese, English and Thai websites and app, to fill that gap.

Users and scale

SMM states that it serves more than four million registered users, including over eight hundred thousand enterprises, across Asia-Pacific, Europe and Africa, and that it serves more than ten thousand clients worldwide. Earlier company statements cited more than three point six million global registered users with daily page views exceeding six hundred thousand. Its LinkedIn profile summarises the offer as prices and news, data, publications, consulting and events, with a company size in the five hundred to one thousand employee range. SMM also describes its spot platform as China's largest metals spot platform, with a cumulative transaction value figure cited in renminbi trillions and clearing through the Shanghai Clearing House, underlining that its role extends from information into market infrastructure.

Position in the industry

Within China's crowded commodity information sector, SMM occupies the specialist position in metals: where generalist services cover energy, chemicals and agriculture as well as metals, SMM's identity is built entirely around the metals and mining value chain. Its twenty-five-year history, IOSCO-aligned methodology, use in contracts and in a cleared copper swap, and expanding office network in London, Singapore and Southeast Asia have made "SMM prices" a standard reference in Chinese metals trading and an increasingly common one in international trade with China. For producers, smelters, traders and battery-material buyers, the service functions simultaneously as a news wire, a benchmark administrator and a research house — the combination that defines a modern price reporting agency.