Three commercial grades dominate the merchant magnesium ingot market: 99.90% min for general alloying, 99.95% min for electronic and sacrificial-anode duty, and 99.98% min for high-end applications, with 7.5 kg notch-book and 300 kg sow the two most common packing formats from Chinese smelters in Shanxi, Shaanxi and Ningxia [S3].
Procurement teams should treat the grade call, the documentary stack, and the Incoterm as three locks that must all click before price negotiation starts, because a low FOB Tianjin offer on the wrong grade still costs more than a correct-grade shipment at a higher per-tonne number [S3][S8].
Purity Bands and Where Each Grade Lands
99.90% min is the workhorse commercial grade and is explicitly named as the feedstock for downstream magnesium alloy ingot feeding AZ91D, AM60B and AS41B die-casting cells; the 99.95–99.98% bands are reserved for electronic chassis, rail-truck interior panels, and sacrificial-anode duty [S3]. AZ91D, with 9% Al / 0.7% Zn / 0.2% Mn, runs at a density of 1.81 g/cm³, roughly 35% lighter than aluminum and 78% lighter than steel, which is the mechanical justification for paying the grade premium in the first place [S2][S3].
Merchant listings confirm the three-band menu in practice: 99.9% for general alloying, 99.95% and 99.99% for specialised applications, with purity verified against ASTM B92-like commercial purity bands rather than a single global number [S3][S4]. Specifiers should write the purity call into the PO alongside the Fe/Si/Cu/Ni/Al/Mn/Cl limits, because the residual elements drive downstream corrosion behaviour more than the headline magnesium percentage [S3].
Required Documentation Stack
Every credible magnesium ingot shipment carries a Material Test Certificate (MTC) listing spectrographic chemical composition, batch or heat number, manufacturer details, and date of manufacture, plus a Certificate of Origin for cross-border clearance and a Safety Data Sheet (SDS) covering storage and handling [S9]. Buyers should request a third-party test report for aluminum, zinc and manganese content together with tensile and yield strength data, and verify the material against industry standards such as ASTM or AMS where the application is aerospace or defence [S1].
For repeat bulk orders the document that matters most is the consistency of composition across batches, not a single good heat; this is the procurement signal that separates a real smelter from a trading house that re-labels spot lots [S8]. Export documentation for India-bound shipments should explicitly confirm MSDS, HS code classification, and packaging suited to the chosen shipping method, with HS code 8104.11 used for unworked magnesium as the typical classification line [S8].
Packaging, MOQ, and Incoterm Mechanics
Chinese merchant lines ship 99.90% min ingot from Tianjin FOB at 5 t minimum order quantity and 2,000 t/month capability, with 7.5 kg notch-book ingots for foundries and 300 kg or 1,000 kg sows for remelt shops [S3]. Smaller 1 t and 2 t MOQs appear on Alibaba-grade listings from 1–3 year-old trading entities, but the unit price on those runs is typically 30–60% above the same purity from a 5,000 t/month integrated smelter [S4].
Incoterm choice controls more of the landed cost than most buyers expect: FOB Anyang or FOB Tianjin transfers risk at the Chinese port and lets the buyer consolidate with other metals on one vessel, while CIF to a European or North American port shifts the freight and insurance to the seller, which can be useful for a first-time trial shipment under 20 t [S1]. The Pidgeon process route that produces this material runs calcined dolomite with 75% FeSi briquettes retorted at 1200 °C under vacuum, then remelts the condensate for casting, and the energy intensity of that route is one reason Chinese-origin prices remain below 1.5–2.5 USD/kg on the 99.9% band even with EU CBAM adjustments [S3].
Supplier Type Matrix: Smelter, Producer, Stockist
The merchant chain splits into four archetypes with very different risk profiles: integrated smelters that run their own Pidgeon lines from dolomite to ingot, alloy producers that remelt primary magnesium with alloying elements, secondary producers feeding on scrap, and distributors or stockists with mixed sourcing [S2][S3]. For a buyer who needs 100–500 t/month of 99.90% min with MTC per heat, the integrated smelter is the only archetype that can sign a multi-quarter contract at fixed composition; stockists are appropriate for spot tonnage under 25 t but should never be the primary source for a serial-production die-casting line [S2].
A side-by-side of the four supplier types against procurement criteria looks like this: integrated smelters win on consistency and tonnage (10,000+ t/month capability, batch-traceable MTC), alloy producers win on application support (can ship AZ91D / AM60B / AS41B ready-to-cast), secondary producers win on cost and CBAM exposure (scrap route carries lower carbon intensity), and stockists win on speed and small MOQ (1–5 t ex-warehouse) [S2][S3]. The worst procurement outcome is treating a stockist as a smelter, because composition drift between heats will show up as porosity variation in the die-cast part rather than as an out-of-spec MTC [S2][S8].
Logistics, Storage, and What Kills Magnesium in Transit
Magnesium ingots are the most storage-stable magnesium form, but they are not maintenance-free: keep them in a dry indoor area on pallets, away from acids, oxidisers, and ignition sources, with desiccant in the packing for sea freight because salt-laden air accelerates surface oxidation that downstream remelt shops will reject [S8]. Sea-worthy packing under GB/T 3499-2003 is the reference standard for export-grade ingots from non-Chinese origin re-sellers, and the same code is cited on B2B listings as a quality gate [S4].
Process-side context for the buyer who feeds a die-casting cell: magnesium die casting machine cells use the same magnesium die casting machine platform as aluminum but at lower melt temperatures (650–680 °C versus 660–720 °C for Al), and the instrument stack on the cell includes flow meter loops on cooling water, industrial valve banks on the coolant manifold, and pressure transmitter feedback on the shot-end hydraulic cylinder [S3]. A useful procurement tie-in is that a consistent ingot supplier lets the cell run a tighter melt-loss budget, typically 2–4% versus 5–8% with mixed-scrap feed [S3].
2026 Market Signals Worth Tracking
Trackable procurement signals as of 2026-09-02: (1) the EU CBAM transitional reporting period for magnesium imports, which will move the landed-cost calculation from pure FOB-plus-freight to FOB-plus-freight-plus-embodied-carbon from 2026 onward, with Pidgeon-route Chinese material carrying the highest exposure among the four supplier archetypes; (2) ASTM B92 revision activity, which has been the reference commercial-purity standard for years and which spec teams should monitor for changes to the Fe/Mn limits; and (3) the 5–10 t MOQ range across Chinese and Indian merchant listings, which sits below the 50–100 t MOQ that large smelters typically enforce, making it the realistic entry point for a first-time buyer [S1][S3][S4][S8]. For related procurement guidance on adjacent non-ferrous feedstocks, the nickel sulfate battery-grade map covers another metal where grade call and document stack drive landed cost as much as headline price.