Coltan. The coveted mineral

I remember as it was yesterday, my first mobile. It was a Spanish telephone company called Airtel and what my grandmother called “object of the devil” was a Motorola.

What I don´t remember is the first call I made. I guess I called my dad or my best friend but it would have been nice to capture that moment making a video or an audio record to show it to my future kids, if any…

- And you know what? When I was your age we didn´t have mobile phones…

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It is unnecessary

To explain how the phone industry has developed since then and how the mobile phone has reached every country and every little village around the globe.

Nowadays the number of cell phones is bigger than the population on earth. There is 4.7bn cellular unique mobile subscribers right now and the number increases every second. It is quite impressive to take a look at how fast it does:

https://www.gsmaintelligence.com

All this translates obviously into money:

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Tantalum capacitors

They store large amounts of energy to support the power rails of highly integrated circuits. They can be found in almost every electronic device nowadays, including of course, almost every cell phone.

The element tantalum is extracted from the columbite-tentalite, mainly on the mines of Congo and there have been permanent conflicts and wars on the country because of the extraction and manufacture of it.

The Tantalun element is also known as Coltan.