Open data · critical minerals

Who holds the hardest metal — and who cuts the rest of us off?

Tungsten — wolfram, W — melts at 3,422 °C, weighs as much as gold and, bonded with cobalt as cemented carbide, cuts every other metal on Earth. It is the filament in the old light bulb, the insert in the machining centre, the pick in the mining machine, the core of the armour-piercing round and the alloy in the tank penetrator. China mines four-fifths of it, holds more than half the reserves and converts more than four-fifths into the ammonium paratungstate, oxides, powders and carbide the world buys. On 4 February 2025, hours after a US tariff took effect, Beijing put all of it under export licence; in December it named the fifteen companies allowed to export; in January 2026 it cut Japan off entirely. The benchmark price rose roughly ninefold, the Pentagon signed a $2 billion stockpile contract, and the first Western mines in a generation — Sangdong in Korea, Hemerdon in Devon, Boguty and the Kazakh giants — are only now reaching production. This page tracks where tungsten is mined, processed and consumed, who can turn the supply off and who is building alternatives — using open data from USGS, BGS, the International Tungsten Industry Association, Fastmarkets, SMM and company disclosures. Built for the tungsten trade — miners, APT and carbide producers, tool and hardmetal makers, defence and aerospace procurement — and for geopolitics researchers and think tanks.

0of tungsten mined worldwide in 2025 — a market a fortieth the size of copper by tonnage, and harder to replace (USGS estimate)
0of world mine production came from China in 2025 (67,000 t); more than four-fifths of processing capacity is Chinese too (USGS, industry estimates)
0rise in the Rotterdam APT benchmark from the start of 2025 (~$331/mtu) to September 2026 ($2,900–3,100/mtu) — a peak near $3,185 in April (USGS, SMM, Fastmarkets)
0ceiling of the US Defense Logistics Agency's tungsten stockpile contract awarded to Elmet on 14 September 2026, with $450 million of Pentagon equity alongside
Interactive map

The tungsten world map

Scheelite and wolframite mines, the APT, oxide and carbide plants that turn concentrate into hardmetal, the mines idled by the last price collapse and now restarting — and the projects racing to replace Chinese supply, from Yeongwol to Devon to the Kazakh steppe. Tap a marker for details; toggle layers below. Circle size ≈ scale of operation.

Mine APT / powder / carbide plant Idled / restarting Development project
Almost every tungsten mine outside China sells concentrate to a handful of converters — Ganzhou and Xiamen in China, Wolfram Bergbau in Austria, H.C. Starck in Germany, Global Tungsten & Powders in Pennsylvania, Masan's plant in Vietnam. That midstream, not the mine, is where China's leverage sits: Chinese mines are mapped by district and the Ganzhou and Xiamen clusters carry a single large processing marker each.
From wolframite to APT to carbide insert

One metal, many disguises

Tungsten travels as a black or honey-coloured ore, as a 65% concentrate priced by the metric ton unit, as the white APT crystals that every price screen quotes, as grey powders and, finally, as the sintered hardmetal tooth that machines everything else — or the heavy-alloy dart that goes through armour. Each form has its own buyers, its own export-control code and, since 2025, its own licence. Tap a stage.

Upstream (mine & concentrate) Midstream (APT, oxide, powder) Downstream (products) Circular
Mine to machining centre — and to penetrator

The journey of a tonne of tungsten

From a scheelite skarn under a Korean mountain or a wolframite vein in Jiangxi to the carbide insert on a lathe and the heavy-alloy core of a tank round. Six stages, each with its own bottleneck — and in 2026 the bottleneck sits at stage three, where the chemistry that turns concentrate into APT happens almost entirely inside one country's export-licence regime.

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Production & reserves

Where tungsten comes from

Mine production by country, 2025

Tonnes of tungsten content, log scale (USGS estimates)
Source: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 (2025 figures are estimates; world total ~85,000 t, up from ~82,000 t in 2024). China's 67,000 t is 79% of the world; the next ten producers together mine about 15,000 t. Kazakhstan appears for the first time thanks to the Boguty mine, which started in late 2024.

Reserves by country

Thousand tonnes of tungsten content (world total >4.7 million tonnes)
Source: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026. China holds about 53% of reserves; Australia's 570,000 t shrinks to 220,000 t on a JORC-compliant basis. Kazakhstan's giant deposits (410,000 t of WO₃ in JORC reserves at Northern Katpar and Upper Kairakty alone) and Canada's Mactung and Sisson sit inside the "other" wedge because USGS does not yet break them out.

A decade of dependence: world output and China's share

Tungsten mine production, tonnes of tungsten content — world and China, BGS 2014–2024
Source: BGS World Mineral Statistics (tungsten, mine). The world has mined 75,000–90,000 t a year for a decade; China's share has moved between 78% and 84% and the rest of the world has never exceeded ~17,000 t. The 2024 dip (75,800 t, China 59,000 t) reflects BGS's lower Chinese estimate; USGS puts China at 67,000 t in both 2024 and 2025 — the two agencies disagree by ~8,000 t on a number Beijing itself only reports as a mining quota.
Explore where tungsten is mined, country by country since 1970, on the supply-chain map (BGS publishes no country series for APT or carbide, so the map shows the mine stage only) and in the Mineral Explorer.
Processing

The chokepoint is the chemistry

Tungsten ore is not smelted; it is digested. Concentrate is leached in alkali, purified and crystallised into ammonium paratungstate — APT, the white powder that is the industry's benchmark product — then calcined to oxide, reduced with hydrogen to metal powder and carburised into tungsten carbide. Each step is a chemical plant, not a furnace, and more than four-fifths of that capacity sits in China: the Ganzhou cluster in Jiangxi, Xiamen Tungsten in Fujian, Zhuzhou in Hunan. When Beijing licensed exports of APT, oxide and powders in February 2025, it licensed the middle of the chain — which is why a Kazakh or Australian mine can still ship concentrate and a Japanese tool maker can still go short.

Processing geography

One Chinese tungsten capital, three Western refiners, a Vietnamese plant now part-American — and the US converters the Pentagon is paying to grow

🇨🇳Ganzhou, Xiamen and the quota machine

Jiangxi's Ganzhou prefecture — "the tungsten capital of the world", mined since Xihuashan opened in 1907 — is where Jiangxi Tungsten Holding, Zhangyuan Tungsten and dozens of APT and carbide plants sit on top of the largest mining quota in the country (21,300 t of the 58,000 t first batch for 2025). Xiamen Tungsten, with 12,000 t of smelting capacity it calls the world's largest and 46.5 billion yuan of revenue in 2025, and Minmetals' Zhuzhou Cemented Carbide complete the trio. Four groups — Minmetals, CMOC, Xiamen and Jiangxi Tungsten — account for roughly 45% of Chinese output; the state sets the quota, the licence list and, increasingly, the world price.

🇦🇹The European refiners

Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten, Sandvik's subsidiary in St Martin im Sulmtal, Austria, runs Europe's main APT and carbide-powder refinery on concentrate from its own Mittersill mine and imports — and holds an offtake on Sangdong. H.C. Starck Tungsten in Goslar, Germany, the continent's largest tungsten chemicals and powder plant, was sold by Vietnam's Masan to Mitsubishi Materials for $134.5 million in December 2024 and is now being expanded by 40% to recycle scrap for a Japan cut off from China. Plansee's Global Tungsten & Powders in Towanda, Pennsylvania, is the biggest converter in the United States and takes more than 90% of Sangdong's Phase 1 output under a 21-year contract.

🇻🇳Nui Phao: the plant that became a stake

Masan High-Tech Materials' Nui Phao mine and APT plant in Thai Nguyen produce nearly all of Vietnam's ~3,000 t a year — the largest tungsten operation outside China until Sangdong and Boguty arrived — under a licence that runs to 2034. On 24 September 2026 Elmet Group agreed to pay $124.75 million for 4.99% of the company, valuing it at about $2.5 billion, alongside an eight-year contract for roughly 1,250 t of tungsten trioxide equivalent a year: an American toll on a Vietnamese chokepoint.

🇺🇸Seven converters and no mine

The United States has seven companies able to convert concentrate, APT, oxide or scrap into tungsten and carbide powders (USGS) — Global Tungsten & Powders, Kennametal, Buffalo Tungsten, Elmet and a few smaller plants — and no mine since 2015. Its answer in 2026 is to fund the converters: Elmet's $2 billion Defense Logistics Agency contract for ores, concentrates and sodium tungstate, $450 million of Department of War preferred equity, and more than $165 million of new capacity in Lewiston, Maine, Coldwater, Michigan and Euclid, Ohio, plus a ~$150 million share of the Springer Tungsten Complex in Nevada with Blue Moon Metals and EQ Resources.

Sources: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 (US converters, mine history); Chinese Ministry of Natural Resources 2025 quota allocation via SMM and CTIA; Xiamen Tungsten 2025 results via SMM; Almonty (GTP and Wolfram Bergbau offtakes); Mitsubishi Materials and H.C. Starck disclosures; Elmet Group press releases (14 and 24 September 2026); Masan High-Tech Materials.

Where China's exports went — and stopped

Chinese exports of tungsten products, tonnes gross weight, 2024 vs 2025 (Chinese customs via CTIA and SMM)
Source: China Tungsten Industry Association and Chinese customs data via SMM. Total tungsten-product exports fell 19.7% to 15,515 t in 2025 (13,096 t of contained metal, −20%); the licensed intermediates — APT, tungsten powder and tungsten carbide powder — fell 41.7% to 3,877 t; APT alone went from 782 t in 2024 to 243 t in January–November 2025 (57% of it to Japan) and to zero in January–February 2026. Meanwhile China's imports of tungsten ore "skyrocketed" (SMM) as its smelters bought Kazakh, African and Southeast Asian concentrate to feed a domestic market that now pays more than the export market. 2024 totals are derived from the reported 2025 volumes and year-on-year changes.

From ore to APT to carbide, step by step

The primary route (top) carries roughly two-thirds of supply; the scrap route (bottom) the rest. Scroll sideways on mobile →
PRIMARY ROUTE (ROUGHLY TWO-THIRDS OF SUPPLY) SECONDARY ROUTE (SCRAP — ROUGHLY A THIRD) 1 · Source ⛏ Scheelite (CaWO₄) or wolframite ((Fe,Mn)WO₄) — or hardmetal scrap China mines 79% 2 · Concentrate 🪨 Gravity and flotation to ~65% WO₃ — priced per mtu (10 kg WO₃) tagged under ITSCI in the 3T belt 3 · Digest → APT 🧪 Alkali leach, solvent extraction, crystallise (NH₄)₁₀[H₂W₁₂O₄₂] China: >80% · export licence since Feb 2025 4 · Oxide → powder → WC 🔥 Calcine to WO₃, reduce in hydrogen, carburise with carbon at ~1,400 °C 15 licensed Chinese exporters, 2026–27 2 · Collect ♻ Worn inserts, drill bits, heavy-alloy scrap, grinding sludge, filaments US scrap exports to Japan ×24 in Q1 2026 3 · Zinc process or chemical 🧫 Zinc-melt to reclaim WC-Co; or oxidise and re-digest to APT (Goslar, Akita) Sumitomo: $100m plant, +50% by 2028 5 · End uses 🛠 Cemented-carbide tools (~65%), tool steels and superalloys, wire, electrodes, heavy alloys, penetrators, catalysts no substitute without a performance loss
A metric ton unit (mtu) is 10 kg of tungsten trioxide (WO₃), containing 7.93 kg of tungsten — the unit in which concentrate and APT are priced. Cemented carbide is tungsten carbide bonded with cobalt (typically 6–12%) by sintering. Chinese tungsten quotas are stated in tonnes of 65% WO₃ concentrate. The 3T belt is the tin–tantalum–tungsten artisanal mining region of the eastern DR Congo and its neighbours.
Demand

The metal that cuts, drills and pierces

Tungsten demand is industrial, unglamorous and inelastic: two-thirds of it is cemented carbide, and a machining insert or a road-milling tooth uses grams of a metal that costs cents per part even at $3,000 an mtu. What changed in 2025–26 is not the tool maker's order book but the arsenal's: penetrators, warheads and drone fragments in Ukraine and the Gulf, restocked by governments that had spent thirty years running stockpiles down.

What tungsten is used for

Approximate share of world tungsten consumption by first use (ITIA)
Source: International Tungsten Industry Association (cemented carbide ~65%, steels and superalloys ~14%, mill products ~12%, chemicals and other ~9%). In the United States about 60% goes into cemented-carbide parts for construction, metalworking, mining and oil and gas drilling (USGS MCS 2026). Recycled scrap supplies roughly a third of world demand.

The forces pulling demand

Industrial bedrock, a defence multiplier — and a substitution ceiling

🛠The hardmetal lock-in

Every CNC machining centre, every drill bit in a shale well, every tunnel-boring cutter and every pick on a coal shearer runs on tungsten carbide; the alternatives USGS lists — titanium or niobium carbide, cermets, ceramics, tool steels — reduce tungsten rather than replace it and cost speed or tool life. Sumitomo Electric raised cutting-tool prices by up to 60% in 2026 and customers paid: the metal is a rounding error in the cost of the part it makes.

🎯The defence multiplier

Tungsten heavy alloy penetrators, carbide-cored armour-piercing rounds, pre-formed fragments and the tungsten cubes packed into loitering-munition warheads made 2024–26 the strongest run of defence demand since the Cold War — Fastmarkets reports aerospace and defence buyers "strengthening" demand into a market with no spare supply. The United States, Japan, Korea and the EU are all now stockpiling; the Pentagon's Elmet contract alone runs to 2031 with a two-year option.

🔋The quiet growth uses

Tungsten wire is replacing steel in the diamond saws that slice silicon wafers for solar cells; tungsten and its alloys line semiconductor fabs, x-ray tubes and radiation shielding; and Almonty pitches nano tungsten oxide as a battery-electrode coating that could lift the 1.4 kg of tungsten in an EV toward 2.5 kg. None of it is big yet; all of it grows faster than machining.

>80%of the world's tungsten conversion capacity — APT, oxide, powder and carbide — is Chinese (industry estimates via Fastmarkets and 9DASHLINE), against a 79% share of mining. China is also the largest consumer: its domestic APT price has decoupled from, and now often exceeds, the export price.
Geopolitics

A licence, a cut-off, a record and a rebuild

Tungsten's modern history runs through two world wars, a Chinese price war that closed the West's mines, a WTO case Beijing lost, and — since February 2025 — the most complete weaponisation of a metal supply chain yet attempted. The 2025–26 sequence turned a $1 billion-a-year industry into a security file on three continents.

1783 – 1945

Wolfram: from Bergara to the wolfram wars

The Elhuyar brothers isolate tungsten from wolframite at Bergara in the Basque Country in 1783 — hence W. It becomes strategic when Germany learns to make high-speed steel and cemented carbide with it (Widia, 1926) and armour-piercing cores from it: in the Second World War Britain and the United States pre-emptively buy up Portuguese and Spanish wolfram — Panasqueira's "wolfram fever" — until Salazar embargoes exports in June 1944. China's Xihuashan mine in Jiangxi, opened in 1907, already supplies most of the world.

1980s – 2015

China closes the West's mines — then loses at the WTO

Chinese exports flood the market in the 1980s and the West's mines shut one by one; Austria's Mittersill and Portugal's Panasqueira survive, Canada's Cantung shuts and reopens, the last US mines close. From 2005 Beijing imposes export quotas and duties, APT climbs to about $450 an mtu in 2011, and the United States, EU and Japan take China to the WTO in 2012 over rare earths, tungsten and molybdenum. China loses in 2014, scraps the quotas in 2015 — and prices collapse. Cantung closes for good in October 2015; the United States has not mined tungsten since.

Oct 2018

Hemerdon fails

Wolf Minerals' Hemerdon mine in Devon — Britain's first new metal mine in 45 years, one of the largest tungsten deposits outside China — goes into administration after three years of processing problems and APT below $300. Tungsten West buys it in 2019 and spends six years redesigning the plant for a price that did not exist. In December 2024 the US Department of Defense awards Fireweed's Mactung $15.8 million and Northcliff's Sisson $15 million under the Defense Production Act: the first Western money into new tungsten mines in a generation.

4 Feb 2025

Beijing licenses the metal

Hours after a 10% US tariff on Chinese goods takes effect, China's Ministry of Commerce and customs administration put tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum and indium items under dual-use export controls, effective immediately: every APT, oxide, powder and carbide export now needs a State Council licence. Washington had already lifted Section 301 tariffs on Chinese tungsten products to 50% at the end of 2024. In April Beijing cuts the first-batch mining quota to 58,000 t of 65% concentrate, 6.5% below 2024.

Feb – Dec 2025

Exports halve, prices double, the West starts building

Chinese APT exports fall from 782 t in 2024 to 243 t in January–November; Rotterdam APT rises from $331 to $675 an mtu over the year and concentrate from $266 to $551 (USGS). Kazakhstan's Boguty mine, started in November 2024 by China's Jiaxin, becomes the year's biggest new source; Guardian Metal's Pilot Mountain gets $6.2 million of DPA money; in October a Kazakhstan–US joint venture on Northern Katpar and Upper Kairakty is announced with $1.6 billion of indicative EXIM and DFC support. The November Trump–Xi truce suspends China's October rare-earth measures and the antimony ban but not tungsten licensing. In December Beijing names the 15 companies allowed to export tungsten in 2026–27, and Almonty delivers Sangdong's first truckload of ore.

Jan – Feb 2026

Japan is cut off

On 6 January, citing Prime Minister Takaichi's remarks on Taiwan, China bans dual-use exports to Japan for military end users or uses — with APT, tungsten oxide and carbide on the list. Chinese producers suspend all APT shipments to Japan, which had taken 57% of them; by February the flow is zero, and China's total APT exports to everyone are zero for January–February. Rotterdam APT jumps from $900–940 in January to $1,650–1,900 by mid-February; ferro-tungsten hits $200–210 a kilo against $45 a year earlier. On 14 January President Trump declines, for now, to impose Section 232 tariffs on processed critical minerals; Washington announces "Project Vault", a $12 billion stockpiling initiative.

Apr – Jun 2026

$3,185 — and the rebuild goes public

APT peaks near $3,185 an mtu in April, up almost 900% in twelve months (SMM). Elmet Group, the largest US-owned tungsten and molybdenum products maker, raises $120 million on Nasdaq on 22 April; Tungsten West accelerates Hemerdon with a $25 million bridge loan and a proposed £71 million from the UK National Wealth Fund; Sumitomo Electric stops buying from China in May and raises tool prices 60%; Mitsubishi Materials triples some prices in June and expands recycling in Goslar and Akita; Guardian Metal publishes the Pilot Mountain pre-feasibility study on 30 June (first production Q4 2028). Prices ease to $2,500–2,800 in late June as Chinese APT plants cut output and Japanese buyers switch to scrap.

Jul – Sep 2026

First Western tonnes — and a $2 billion stockpile

Sangdong feeds stockpiled ore through its plant from July and is certified for commercial operation on 17 September — the first new tungsten mine in an allied country in decades, with more than 90% of Phase 1 contracted to Global Tungsten & Powders for 21 years. Hemerdon passes its first ore through the rebuilt plant on 11 September. On 14 September the Defense Logistics Agency awards Elmet a stockpile contract with a $2 billion ceiling and $150 million guaranteed, and the Department of War commits $450 million of equity; on 24 September Elmet buys 4.99% of Vietnam's Masan High-Tech Materials for $124.75 million. Kazakhstan's definitive feasibility study on the Katpar–Kairakty giants begins. Rotterdam APT: $2,900–3,100 on 10 September, with Chinese APT operating rates at their lowest of the year.

Sources: USGS MCS 2026; Chinese Ministry of Commerce and General Administration of Customs announcements (4 February 2025; 2026 dual-use catalogue and 6 January 2026 Japan measure) via the IEA policy database, Greenberg Traurig and Fastmarkets; CTIA and SMM export statistics; Fastmarkets and SMM price assessments; Almonty, Elmet, Tungsten West, Guardian Metal, Fireweed and Northcliff disclosures; Astana Times; The Japan Times, CNN and 9DASHLINE (Japan measures and responses); DLA notices; White House Proclamation 11001; WTO DS431/432/433 (China — rare earths, tungsten and molybdenum).
Trade & prices

A market with no exchange

Tungsten has no LME or SHFE contract. Its price is an assessment — Fastmarkets, Argus, SMM and Asian Metal polling a few dozen buyers and sellers of APT and concentrate each week — which is why a licence decision in Beijing can move it 15% in a fortnight and why "the tungsten price" now means two different numbers: the Chinese domestic one and the Rotterdam one that everyone outside the licence list has to pay.

US tungsten import sources, 2021–24

Share of imports of ores, concentrates and all other forms — the dependency of a country with seven converters and no mine
Source: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 (China includes Hong Kong). Net import reliance is more than 50% of apparent consumption; 2025 imports were ~1,700 t of ores and concentrates and ~10,000 t of other forms (APT, oxides, powders, carbide, ferrotungsten, scrap). Section 301 tariffs on Chinese tungsten products rose to 50% at the end of 2024.

The price, in checkpoints

Ammonium paratungstate 88.5% WO₃, cif Rotterdam, US$ per metric ton unit — the benchmark and the extremes
Sources: USGS MCS 2026 (Argus: 2025 start and end levels); Fastmarkets (January, mid-February and late-June 2026 ranges); SMM (12 December 2025, April 2026 peak of $3,185, 10 September 2026). Ranges are plotted at their midpoints; the 2020 low (~$215) and 2011 peak (~$450) are approximate from price compilations. Concentrate (65% WO₃) averaged $252/mtu in 2024 and $380 in 2025 (Argus via USGS).

How this market actually trades

Four markets, one metal

The APT assessment

Ammonium paratungstate — 88.5% WO₃ minimum, in drums — is the product the whole chain prices off: concentrate sells at a percentage of the APT price, oxide and powders at a premium to it. Fastmarkets' cif Rotterdam/Baltimore assessment went from $900–940 in January 2026 to $1,650–1,900 in six weeks and above $3,000 by April; its fob China assessment now tells a different story, and Fastmarkets has launched separate concentrate and metal-bar prices because the old single number no longer describes the market.

The licence gate

Since 4 February 2025 every Chinese export of APT, oxide, powder or carbide needs a Ministry of Commerce licence, granted case by case; since December 2025 only 15 companies may apply, and since 6 January 2026 nothing dual-use may go to Japanese military end users. The result is a two-tier market: Chinese domestic APT prices that diverge from — and sometimes exceed — the export price, exports down 20–70% by product, and Chinese smelters importing ore instead of exporting chemicals.

The concentrate trade

Mines without a plant sell 65% WO₃ concentrate to converters at a payable percentage of APT. The 2026 lists of buyers are short and strategic: Global Tungsten & Powders and Wolfram Bergbau for Sangdong; Thai, Chinese and European plants for Australian and Spanish concentrate; the Pentagon itself, via Elmet, for ores, concentrates and sodium tungstate. China, meanwhile, is now the world's largest importer of tungsten ore — its own quota-capped mines cannot feed its plants.

The scrap arbitrage

Around a third of the world's tungsten already comes from recycled hardmetal, and 2026 turned scrap into a strategic flow: US exports of tungsten scrap to Japan rose 24-fold in the first quarter, Singapore overtook the United States as Japan's largest supplier by April, Indian scrap prices surged as inventories emptied, and Sumitomo and Mitsubishi Materials committed $164 million to new recycling capacity. Every worn insert is now a licence-free ounce.

Sources: Fastmarkets (assessment methodology, 2026 pricing notices and market reports); SMM; Chinese MOFCOM announcements; 9DASHLINE and The Japan Times (Japan trade data and corporate responses); Elmet DLA contract; ITIA (recycling share).

The new swing supplier: Kazakhstan

The only country whose tungsten output went from nothing to No. 3 in two years — and where the next 12,000 t are planned

Kazakhstan mined about 2,400 t of tungsten in 2025 (USGS), all of it from Boguty in the Almaty region, a $300 million open pit and concentrator built by China's Jiaxin International that started in November 2024, planned 3.3 million tonnes of ore in 2025 and 4.95 million by 2027, and booked record revenue of about $136 million last year. Behind it are the two giants of the Soviet-era tungsten map: Northern Katpar and Upper Kairakty in the Karagandy region, 410,000 t of WO₃ in JORC reserves and 1.4 million tonnes of resources, held 70% by US-based Cove Capital and 30% by state miner Tau-Ken Samruk. The plan is roughly 12,000 t a year of tungsten in APT — around 15% of today's world output by the promoters' arithmetic — for at least $1.1 billion, with letters of interest for $900 million from US EXIM and $700 million from the DFC; the definitive feasibility study began in July 2026 and is due before the end of 2027. A third deposit, Aksoran, is scheduled for 2028.

2,400 tfrom a standing start: Kazakhstan's 2025 output already exceeds Russia's and Vietnam's on the way down — and Astana wants the APT plants, not just the concentrate, at home. The buyer of Boguty's concentrate today is China.
Sources: USGS MCS 2026; Astana Times (August 2026); Interfax Kazakhstan (Jiaxin 2025 results); Kazakh Invest; Fastmarkets (Central Asia tungsten analysis).
Concentration risk

The China chokepoint

China mines four-fifths of the world's tungsten, holds half its reserves, converts more than four-fifths of it and consumes more than half — and since February 2025 decides, licence by licence, who else gets any. Its leverage is more complete than in rare earths: there is no Lynas, no Mountain Pass, only a Korean mine that opened last week and a Devon mine that opened last month.

79%

of the world's tungsten was mined in China in 2025 — 67,000 of ~85,000 t (USGS estimates). Its share along the chain:

Sources: USGS MCS 2026 (mine production 2025; reserves: China 2.5 of >4.7 Mt); industry estimates of Chinese APT, oxide, powder and carbide capacity via Fastmarkets and 9DASHLINE (more than 80%); CTIA and SMM (2025 export volumes; China as the world's leading producer, importer and consumer of concentrates per USGS); Chinese Ministry of Natural Resources 2025 first-batch quota 58,000 t (Jiangxi 21,300 t, Hunan 15,530 t, Henan 7,050 t) via SMM and CTIA; MOFCOM (15 licensed exporters for 2026–27).
Dual use

The metal in the penetrator — and in the lathe that made it

Tungsten is the most literally military of the critical minerals: it is what goes through armour, what armour is tested against, what a shaped charge's liner and a missile's counterweight are made of, and what cuts every part of every weapon. Which is why a metal the West mostly stopped mining in the 1980s now has Defense Production Act money, a $2 billion stockpile line, a sourcing ban with a date — and why Japan's experience in 2026 is being read in every defence ministry.

🎯Penetrators and heavy alloy

Tungsten heavy alloy — 90–97% tungsten sintered with nickel and iron or copper — is the non-radioactive rival to depleted uranium for kinetic-energy penetrators: Germany's DM53/DM63 tank rounds, most European and Asian APFSDS ammunition and the cores of medium-calibre cannon rounds use it, while the United States still favours DU in its M829 family. The same alloy makes counterweights, gyroscope rotors, radiation shielding and the fragmentation sleeves of precision munitions.

🔫Carbide cores and drone cubes

Tungsten carbide cores make small-arms rounds armour-piercing (the US M993/M995 family); pre-formed tungsten fragments and cubes fill artillery submunitions, air-defence warheads and, since 2022, the loitering munitions and FPV drones of Ukraine and the Gulf wars — the fastest-growing military use, and one that consumes tungsten by the tonne rather than the gram. USGS lists depleted uranium or hardened steel as the only substitutes, at a cost in performance.

🇺🇸No mine, a date and a stockpile

The United States has not mined tungsten since 2015 and imports more than half its supply, 26% of it from China. From 1 January 2027, under 10 U.S.C. §4872, defence contractors may no longer deliver tungsten heavy alloy or powder melted or produced in China, Russia, North Korea or Iran. To make that possible the Department of War has funded Pilot Mountain ($6.2 million), Mactung ($15.8 million) and Sisson ($15 million), and on 14 September 2026 the Defense Logistics Agency awarded Elmet a contract with a $2 billion ceiling for ores, concentrates and sodium tungstate through 2031, alongside $450 million of preferred equity. The FY2025 stockpile plan already listed 2,041 t of potential tungsten purchases.

🇯🇵Japan: the case study

Japan's tool industry — Sumitomo Electric's Allied Material, Mitsubishi Materials, Kyocera, OSG — got about 30% of its raw material from China, and took 57% of China's APT exports in 2025. After the 6 January 2026 dual-use ban, Chinese producers stopped shipping APT to Japan entirely; Japanese imports of controlled tungsten products fell 50% below the 2025 average by April; Sumitomo halted Chinese purchases in May, raised prices up to 60% and is building a $100 million recycling plant for 2028; Mitsubishi Materials tripled some prices and is doubling Akita by 2028–29. METI and JOGMEC now underwrite diversification under the Economic Security Promotion Act. Nobody outside China had a spare tonne to sell them.

🇪🇺Europe: two mines and a list

The EU mines tungsten at Mittersill, Barruecopardo and Panasqueira and refines it in Austria and Germany; tungsten is a strategic raw material under the Critical Raw Materials Act, on the UK's critical list, and the object of Britain's largest single tungsten bet — up to £71 million of National Wealth Fund money in Hemerdon, which at 3,320 t of WO₃ a year would be the biggest tungsten mine in the West. Europe's exposure is the same as Japan's: Chinese powders in every carbide plant, and Russia — 2,000 t a year, Tyrnyauz restarting under Rostec by 2028 — sanctioned on the other side.

⚔️The 3T war economy

Tungsten is a conflict mineral by statute — Dodd-Frank section 1502 and EU Regulation 2017/821 — because wolframite from the Kivus financed militias; Rwanda's Nyakabingo, Africa's largest tungsten mine, ships under bag-and-tag rules and its owner Trinity Metals is Washington's chosen "responsible" 3T supplier, and the Great Lakes states add their own regional certification under the ICGLR's 2010 Lusaka Declaration. North Korea's 2,000 t a year flow to China under sanctions; Myanmar's Wa State mines tungsten alongside tin. In the 3T belt the paperwork is the product.

Sources: USGS MCS 2026 (US production history, import reliance and sources, substitutes, stockpile plan); 10 U.S.C. §4872 (Section 871 of the FY2019 NDAA, tungsten provisions effective 1 January 2027); Elmet Group and DLA (14 September 2026); Guardian Metal, Fireweed and Northcliff (DPA awards); Chinese MOFCOM (6 January 2026 measure) via The Japan Times, CNN and Greenberg Traurig; 9DASHLINE (Japanese trade data and corporate responses); Tungsten West and UK National Wealth Fund; EU Critical Raw Materials Act; Dodd-Frank Act s.1502; EU Regulation 2017/821; Interfax and Elbrusmetal (Tyrnyauz).
Capital flows

Where the tungsten money is going

For thirty years tungsten was uninvestable outside China: a small market, a price Beijing could halve at will, and a 2018 bankruptcy in Devon to prove it. In 2025–26 the state became the anchor investor — Pentagon equity, EXIM letters, a British sovereign fund, a Kazakh state miner — and the price did the rest. The constraint is now time: the mines being financed today ship in 2027–29. Presented as observation, not investment advice.

🇺🇸The Pentagon as shareholder

Elmet Group went from a Maine mill-products maker to the US tungsten champion in five months: a $120 million Nasdaq IPO on 22 April 2026; on 14 September a Defense Logistics Agency stockpile contract with a $2 billion ceiling and $150 million guaranteed, plus $450 million of Department of War redeemable preferred equity with warrants over 19.9% of the company and a board seat; more than $165 million of new plant in Maine, Michigan and Ohio; a ~$150 million share of the Springer Tungsten Complex in Nevada with Blue Moon Metals and EQ Resources; and on 24 September $124.75 million for 4.99% of Masan High-Tech Materials. The stock rose almost 50% on the announcement.

🇰🇷Sangdong: the first new Western mine

Almonty redomiciled to the United States and listed on Nasdaq in 2025 to become "the non-China tungsten supplier to Western industrial and defence customers"; Sangdong — once the world's largest tungsten mine, closed in the early 1990s — delivered first ore in December 2025, began processing in July 2026 and was certified for commercial operation on 17 September. Phase 1 is about 230,000 mtu of WO₃ a year (some 1,800 t of tungsten, a tenth of today's non-Chinese mine supply), doubling in Phase 2 from 2027; more than 90% is sold to Global Tungsten & Powders for 21 years, 40 t a month of oxide to a US defence contractor, and KfW has offered up to $50 million for a downstream oxide plant. Q1 2026 sales: C$25.4 million, up from C$7.9 million.

🇬🇧Hemerdon, second attempt

Tungsten West has financed the restart of the mine that broke Wolf Minerals: a $25 million bridge loan from Gregory Coffey, due diligence on an $85 million debt package and a proposed £71 million from the UK National Wealth Fund (£36 million of equity at 36p, a £25 million debt facility and a £10 million accordion). First ore went through the rebuilt plant on 11 September 2026; steady state is 332,000 mtu of WO₃ a year — 3,320 t, more than any other mine in the West — with full commissioning targeted for the first quarter of 2027.

🇰🇿Kazakhstan's $1.6 billion bet

Cove Capital (70%) and Tau-Ken Samruk (30%) are spending the second half of 2026 and all of 2027 on a definitive feasibility study for Northern Katpar and Upper Kairakty — 410,000 t of WO₃ in reserves, roughly 12,000 t a year of tungsten in APT planned, at least $1.1 billion of capital and letters of interest for $900 million from US EXIM and $700 million from the DFC. Jiaxin's Boguty, already producing, posted record revenue of $136 million in 2025 and expands to 4.95 million tonnes of ore by 2027. The tungsten map's biggest new addition since Sangdong is Chinese-built and American-financed at once.

🇦🇺The Australians cash in

EQ Resources — Mt Carbine in Queensland and Barruecopardo in Spain — turned 118,946 mtu of production in the year to June 2026 (down 29%) into a record A$160 million of sales (up 142%), a record A$79 million quarter and A$22.5 million of operating cash flow, then joined Elmet's Nevada joint venture. Group 6 Metals, rescued by a A$7.5 million Tasmanian government loan in 2025, processed a record 77,953 t of ore at Dolphin on King Island in the June quarter (21,297 mtu of WO₃), started underground mining and signed a A$110–120 million three-year contract with HMR Drilling. Guardian Metal's Pilot Mountain PFS (30 June 2026) claims a one-year payback and $1.06 billion of after-tax cash flow from 15,916 t of WO₃ over eight years, first production Q4 2028.

⚠️The risks

Every one mirrors the upside. Beijing can loosen quotas and licences as fast as it tightened them — APT fell from ~$450 to ~$170 an mtu after the 2011 peak and the 2015 quota repeal — and Chinese APT plants were already running at their lowest rates of the year in September 2026 as tool makers stopped buying; Sangdong's Phase 1 and Hemerdon's first phase together add barely 5% to world supply; Kazakhstan's giants are two years from a feasibility study, Mactung's is due in 2027, Pilot Mountain's first ore in late 2028; recycling and thrifting respond to $3,000 tungsten within a year; and the junior pipeline — American Tungsten's IMA, Sisson, Aksoran, La Parrilla, Cornwall's Redmoor — is priced for a war economy that a ceasefire could end.

This section describes where capital is flowing, based on public data. It is not financial advice.
Sources: company disclosures (Elmet Group, Almonty Industries, Tungsten West, EQ Resources, Group 6 Metals, Guardian Metal Resources, Fireweed Metals, Northcliff Resources, Masan High-Tech Materials, Jiaxin International); UK National Wealth Fund; US EXIM and DFC via the Astana Times; SMM (September 2026 APT operating rates); trade press (Reuters, Mining.com, Mining Weekly, Kalkine, Benzinga).
Company tracker

The companies that move tungsten

Four Chinese state groups at the top, a handful of European and American converters in the middle, and a newly funded line of Western miners and developers racing a price that Beijing sets. Filter by segment or search.

CompanySegmentKey assetsStatus & recent signals
Company status reflects public disclosures as of late September 2026. This is an observational tracker, not investment advice.
Sources: company disclosures & filings; USGS MCS 2026; CTIA and SMM; trade press (Reuters, Mining.com, Mining Weekly, Kalkine, Interfax, Nikkei).
Data & methodology

Open data sources

FAQ

Common questions

What is tungsten used for?

Mostly for cutting, drilling and wearing things down: about two-thirds of the world's tungsten becomes cemented carbide — tungsten carbide grains bonded with cobalt — the hardmetal in machining inserts, drill bits, mining picks, road-milling teeth and oil-well tools (ITIA). Around 14% goes into tool steels, high-speed steels and superalloys, 12% into mill products such as wire, filaments, electrodes, heat shields and the heavy alloys used for counterweights, radiation shielding and armour-piercing penetrators, and the rest into chemicals and catalysts. Tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal (3,422 °C) and is as dense as gold (19.3 g/cm³), which is why the incandescent light bulb, the tank shell and the semiconductor fab all depend on it — and why USGS lists no substitute that does not cost performance.

Which country produces the most tungsten?

China — about 67,000 of the roughly 85,000 tonnes of tungsten mined worldwide in 2025 (USGS estimates), or 79%, with a distant field behind it: Vietnam (~3,000 t), Kazakhstan (~2,400 t, all from the new Boguty mine), Russia and North Korea (~2,000 t each), Bolivia (~1,700 t), Rwanda (~1,300 t), Australia (~1,000 t), Austria, Spain and Portugal (700–840 t each). China also holds about 2.5 of the world's 4.7 million tonnes of reserves, hosts the biggest deposits (Zhuxi, Dahutang, Shizhuyuan), and converts more than four-fifths of the world's tungsten into APT, oxides, powders and carbide — the Ganzhou cluster in Jiangxi and Xiamen Tungsten in Fujian are the industry's centre of gravity. The United States has not mined tungsten since 2015.

Why did tungsten prices rise ninefold in 2025–26?

Because the country that mines four-fifths of it stopped exporting freely. On 4 February 2025, hours after a US tariff took effect, China's Ministry of Commerce put tungsten under dual-use export licensing; exports of APT collapsed from 782 tonnes in 2024 to 243 in the first eleven months of 2025 and to zero in early 2026, and Beijing cut its first-batch mining quota to 58,000 tonnes and named only 15 companies allowed to export in 2026–27. Rotterdam APT, the industry benchmark, went from about $331 per metric ton unit at the start of 2025 to $675 by year-end (USGS), $900–940 in January 2026, $1,650–1,900 by mid-February and a peak near $3,185 in April, and was still $2,900–3,100 in September 2026 (SMM, Fastmarkets) — roughly nine times the pre-control level. Ferro-tungsten went from $45 to $200 a kilo. On the other side, defence demand for penetrators and drone warheads rose with the wars in Ukraine and the Gulf, Western governments started stockpiling, and the new mines that could answer — Sangdong in Korea, Hemerdon in Devon, Kazakhstan's giant deposits — are only now reaching first production.

What did China's tungsten export controls actually do?

They turned a commodity into a licence. The 4 February 2025 announcement (with tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum and indium) requires every exporter of tungsten items — APT, oxides, powders, carbide, alloys — to obtain a State Council licence under the Export Control Law, and licences have been granted slowly and selectively: total exports of tungsten products fell 19.7% in 2025 to 15,515 tonnes, controlled intermediates (APT, tungsten powder, carbide powder) fell 41.7%, and in December 2025 Beijing limited export rights for 2026–27 to 15 named companies. In January 2026 it went further, banning dual-use exports to Japan altogether after Prime Minister Takaichi's Taiwan remarks; Chinese shipments of APT to Japan — 57% of all Chinese APT exports in 2025 — stopped in February. Sumitomo Electric raised cutting-tool prices by up to 60% and Mitsubishi Materials tripled some tungsten prices. The November 2025 Trump–Xi truce, which suspended China's October rare-earth measures and its antimony ban on the United States, left the tungsten licensing regime untouched.

Is tungsten a conflict mineral?

Yes, by law. Tungsten is the second T in the 3TG — tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold — covered by section 1502 of the US Dodd-Frank Act (2010) and the EU Conflict Minerals Regulation (applied since 2021), because wolframite from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and its neighbours financed armed groups. Every listed company that uses tungsten must trace it to a conformant smelter, and Rwanda's Nyakabingo mine — Africa's largest tungsten producer, run by Trinity Metals — ships under bag-and-tag traceability. The other conflict dimension is newer: tungsten is on the critical-minerals lists of the United States, the EU (a strategic raw material under the Critical Raw Materials Act), the UK, Japan and Korea, and from 1 January 2027 US defence contractors may no longer deliver tungsten heavy alloy or powder melted or produced in China, Russia, North Korea or Iran.

Why do militaries care about tungsten?

Because it is what armour-piercing ammunition is made of, and the West buys it from the country it is arming against. Tungsten heavy alloy — 90–97% tungsten with nickel and iron — is the non-radioactive alternative to depleted uranium in tank penetrators, tungsten carbide cores make small-arms rounds pierce body armour, tungsten fragments and cubes fill missile, artillery and drone warheads, and tungsten sits in every jet engine, radar, shaped charge and hypersonic leading edge. The United States has had no tungsten mine since 2015 and imports more than half of what it uses, a quarter of it from China. The response in 2025–26: Defense Production Act awards to Pilot Mountain, Mactung and Sisson; the $2 billion Defense Logistics Agency stockpile contract and $450 million equity investment in Elmet Technologies announced on 14 September 2026; the Kazakhstan–US joint venture on Northern Katpar and Upper Kairakty; and Almonty's Sangdong, whose oxide is contracted to a US defence supplier at 40 tonnes a month. Japan, cut off entirely in February 2026, is the case study in what happens without them.

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