Ruthenium Calculator – Work Out the Current Ruthenium Value
Material Value · Ruthenium
45.74 £
1.00 g × 1 × 45.7367 £/g = 45.74 £
Buy-back price: The amount a dealer or refinery actually pays. This is typically 2–10% below the melt value, as processing costs and margin are deducted.
Ruthenium is found in technology, not in jewellery
Most of the ruthenium mined goes into electronics. In hard drives it forms thin interlayers that set the magnetic behaviour of the storage layer; on circuit boards it sits in thick-film resistors. Both are quantities in the milligram range per component, spread over billions of units.
The second big consumer is metallurgy. Ruthenium hardens platinum and palladium without discolouring them – this is exactly what the five per cent additive in a Pt950 alloy is for. A platinum ring therefore quite probably contains ruthenium, but as part of the platinum value, not as a separate item.
Then there is chemistry: ruthenium is an important catalyst, among other things in ammonia synthesis. What does not exist is a jewellery market. That is why our alloy list for ruthenium includes only fine metal – 999 and 999.5 parts per thousand.
A by-product that nobody mines deliberately
Ruthenium is not mined in its own right. It arises as a by-product of platinum and nickel mining, almost exclusively in South Africa and Russia. Nobody opens a ruthenium mine; supply follows platinum production.
This has a consequence that can be seen in the price history: power cuts or strikes in South Africa have an immediate effect, on all platinum group metals at the same time. Anyone who lays the calendars for ruthenium, rhodium and iridium side by side will find the same breakout days.
Conversely, demand can rise without supply following. A new platinum mine takes years, and more ruthenium only comes about if more platinum is mined. In such a small market that is enough for strong price movements.
Dealer quotation instead of exchange price
Like rhodium and iridium, ruthenium is not traded on any exchange. There is no fixing, no futures market and no continuous price – the price is the quotation of individual dealers, set once per working day.
For the calculator this means: the value shown is the material value at this quotation. What a buyer actually pays is lower, and in such a small market the spread is wider than for gold or silver.
For reading the price series it means: long unchanged phases are normal and are not a sign of a stable market but of an unchanged quotation. The performance calendar shows such phases as series of grey cells.