What does South Korea produce and export?

What does South Korea produce?

What does South Korea export?

South Korea's own tracked-export mix

Unlike the chart above, this treemap sizes each commodity by its share of South Korea's own $12.7 billion of tracked exports, not by world trade. Steel alone is 49% of it. See the full export dependency report for how South Korea compares with other countries.

Top-ten importer of

• Molybdenum: #1, 13% of world imports, $1.1 billion (2024)
• Lithium: #2, 11% of world imports, $426.1 million (2024)
• Beef: #3, 6.5% of world imports, $2.4 billion (2024)
• Copper: #3, 4.5% of world imports, $4.7 billion (2024)
• Corn: #3, 5.5% of world imports, $2.6 billion (2024)
• Iron ore: #3, 4.9% of world imports, $7.8 billion (2024)
• Magnesium: #3, 6.4% of world imports, $58.7 million (2024)
• Natural gas: #3, 7.2% of world imports, $34.1 billion (2024)
• Steel: #3, 4.4% of world imports, $3.1 billion (2024)
• Coal: #4, 8.6% of world imports, $15.3 billion (2024)
• Crude oil: #4, 6.4% of world imports, $84.5 billion (2024)
• Graphite: #4, 8.2% of world imports, $44 million (2024)
• Niobium: #4, 6.2% of world imports, $211.9 million (2024)
• Plywood: #4, 4% of world imports, $681.8 million (2024)
• Pork: #5, 5.5% of world imports, $2.1 billion (2024)
• Tin: #5, 7% of world imports, $452.2 million (2024)
• Vanadium: #5, 7% of world imports, $47.2 million (2024)
• Aluminum: #6, 5.1% of world imports, $4 billion (2024)
• Mangoes: #6, 3.9% of world imports, $160.6 million (2024)
• Shrimp: #6, 3.5% of world imports, $1.1 billion (2024)
• Natural rubber: #7, 3.3% of world imports, $557.1 million (2024)
• Oranges: #7, 3.6% of world imports, $200.2 million (2024)
• Rhodium: #7, 4.2% of world imports, $312.3 million (2024)
• Sesame seed: #7, 3.5% of world imports, $278.6 million (2024)
• Manganese: #8, 1.4% of world imports, $87.6 million (2024)
• Silicon: #8, 4.3% of world imports, $172.7 million (2024)
• Lead: #9, 4.1% of world imports, $354.1 million (2024)
• Pineapples: #9, 3% of world imports, $85.4 million (2024)
• Wool: #9, 1.1% of world imports, $29.7 million (2024)
• Cobalt: #10, 1.5% of world imports, $69.1 million (2024)
• Jute: #10, 1.2% of world imports, $2.5 million (2024)

Sources: FAOSTAT (crops and livestock), USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries (minerals), Energy Institute Statistical Review (energy) for production; CEPII BACI for trade. Ranks count only the commodities on this site.

South Korea commodity by commodity

One page for each commodity where South Korea is a top-five producer or exporter with at least 3% of the world total.

• Bismuth #2 producer, #2 exporter
• Indium #2 producer
• Lead #2 exporter
• Silver #5 exporter
• Steel #3 exporter
• Uranium #5 producer
• Vanadium #4 exporter
• Zinc #2 exporter

South Korea in the pattern reports

What the cross-commodity reports under Patterns say about South Korea, computed from the same data as this page.

What South Korea uses

South Korea had about 52 million people and a food supply of 3,430 kilocalories per person a day in FAO's 2023 food balance sheets. Its eight largest supplies among the commodities tracked there:

FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets. Per-person rank counts countries of at least 1 million people. See consumption and self-sufficiency.

Who supplies South Korea

• Single-supplier markets. South Korea buys half or more of its imports from one country in 12 of 36 import markets of $250 million or more, among them iron ore from Australia (69%, $7.8 billion); steel from Japan (50%, $3.1 billion); beef from United States (52%, $2.4 billion); gold from Australia (54%, $2.4 billion); soybeans from United States (56%, $667 million); palm oil from Malaysia (64%, $581 million). Import dependency.
• A new largest supplier. copper: Indonesia (22% in 2022) to Chile (29% in 2024). Supplier shifts.

South Korea and critical minerals

One origin supplied more than 65% of its 2024 imports by value on 11 critical-mineral customs lines (the EU's benchmark for strategic raw materials):

CEPII BACI (bilateral trade by customs line). See supplier exposure.

Downloads and citation

This country's rankings as JSON · PDF summary. Cite as: Commodity Origins, "What does South Korea produce and export?", https://commodityorigins.com/countries/KOR/ (CC BY 4.0).

Data updated 22 October 2026.

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