Billionaire Amazon Bet Vindicated on Apple Tin Demand

As metal prices plunged on the eve of the financial crisis in September 2008, Peru’s billionaire Brescia family paid about $400 million to buy the world’s largest tin deposit in the Amazon jungle.

Now their mining company Minsur SA sits alone among mostly Asian rivals as the only major producer in 2014 that can raise output of a metal increasingly in demand because it’s mixed into solder for circuitry in smartphones. Tin is one of only two industrial metals that became more expensive this year.