Tungsten: Up 900% in a Year, and Nobody’s Talking About It
Here is a price chart that should have been on every desk’s morning note, and wasn’t.
Ammonium paratungstate — APT, the benchmark intermediate that sits between tungsten ore and everything tungsten becomes — trades around $3,185 per metric tonne unit in Rotterdam as I write this.
It is up roughly 350% this year.
About 900% over twelve months.
A commodity that most generalist investors have never knowingly owned, and could not pick out of a periodic table, has done a clean 10-bag in a year.
Quietly. With almost no coverage outside the trade press.
When we see a move like that on the desk, we don’t get excited. We get suspicious, and then we get to work on one question: who actually captures this, and is it already in the price?
This edition is our answer. It is a single name.
First, why the price moved — and why it isn’t a spike that fades next quarter
Tungsten is not exotic in its uses. It is the hardest, densest industrial metal we have in volume.
It tips armour-piercing penetrators and kinetic munitions. It is the carbide in every serious cutting tool and mining bit. It is in the chips — tungsten is used in semiconductor interconnects and contacts. It is genuinely irreplaceable in most of these roles.
What is exotic is where it comes from.
China controls roughly 80% of mined tungsten and a similar share of the world’s processing — the step that turns concentrate into APT, oxide, powder and metal. This is not a new fact. What is new is that Beijing decided to use it.
In February 2025, China placed tungsten products, including APT, under export control. Then it went further. In December 2025, MOFCOM replaced the old quota system with a state-designated exporter whitelist: for 2026–27, only 15 companies are authorised to export tungsten at all.
That is not a tariff. It is a hand on the tap.
The effect is visible in the volumes, not just the price. APT exports from China fell almost 70% — from 782 tonnes in 2024 to 243 tonnes across the first eleven months of 2025 — and were still down year-on-year into early 2026.
So this is not a speculative squeeze that normalises when some inventory clears. It is a structural withdrawal of supply by the dominant producer, into a market that has no near-term alternative.
That is the kind of setup that re-rates an entire supply chain. The question is which link.
The part the market gets wrong: the chokepoint isn’t the mine
Most of the commentary we’ve read frames this as a mining story. Find tungsten in the ground outside China, and you win.
We think that’s half right, and the wrong half.
The genuinely scarce capability is not digging up tungsten ore. There is tungsten ore in plenty of friendly jurisdictions. The scarce capability is everything that happens after the mine: converting concentrate into APT, into oxide, into powder and metal that meets military and industrial specification.
That midstream — the refining and conversion — is where China’s dominance is most complete and hardest to replicate, because it’s chemically demanding, capital-intensive, environmentally messy, and the West spent thirty years offshoring it without noticing.
So the real prize isn’t a miner. It’s a company that can mine tungsten outside China and process it outside China, to spec, under long-term contract, before a hard regulatory deadline forces Western buyers to find exactly that.
There is, today, essentially one listed company that fits that description at production scale.
The name: Almonty Industries
Almonty (NASDAQ: ALM; also TSX: AII, ASX: AII).
Its flagship is the Sangdong mine, in Gangwon Province, South Korea — historically one of the largest tungsten deposits in the world.
Sangdong was closed for more than thirty years. It went dark when cheap Chinese tungsten made a Korean mine uneconomic in the 1980s–90s.
Almonty brought it back.
Commercial mining began in December 2025. CEO Lewis Black held the formal Phase 1 commissioning ceremony on 17 March 2026 — a mine that had been silent for three decades, restarting at precisely the moment the West discovered it needed exactly this.
You don’t get a cleaner embodiment of the whole thesis than that. A mothballed Western-aligned mine, written off as a relic of a cheaper era, switched back on because the cheaper era ended.
Phase 1 is designed to process about 640,000 tonnes of ore a year, for roughly 2,300 tonnes of tungsten concentrate.
Phase 2, targeted for 2027, is designed to roughly double that — about 1.2 million tonnes of ore and roughly 4,600 tonnes of concentrate a year.
And the early numbers have started to show up: Almonty reported first-quarter revenue up about 221% as Sangdong came online.
Why this is a now problem, with a date on it
Catalysts matter more than stories, so here is the one that anchors this trade.
Starting 1 January 2027, the US Department of Defense is barred from procuring tungsten metal powder and tungsten heavy alloy if any stage of production — mining, refining, separation, melting or fabrication — took place in China, Russia, Iran or North Korea.
That provision has been law since the FY2024 NDAA. The deadline is now eighteen months out and non-negotiable.
Read it carefully, because it’s the whole point: the ban covers refining and melting, not just mining. Washington has effectively legislated demand for non-Chinese tungsten that is also processed outside China.
That is the refining-sovereignty thesis, written into US law, with a date attached.
And Almonty has been positioning straight at it — including relocating its corporate home to Dillon, Montana, to sit closer to the US industrial and defence buyers who will be legally obliged to find suppliers like it.
What you already have, and what’s behind the paywall
If you’ve read this far, you have the setup that we think most of the market is missing:
A structural, policy-driven supply shock in a metal nobody covers.
A chokepoint that sits in processing, not mining.
A single listed producer restarting a strategic Western mine into a hard 2027 regulatory deadline — and building the downstream piece that the thesis actually turns on.
What you don’t yet have is the part that decides whether this is a trade or a trap.
Because here is the uncomfortable fact we have to underwrite: ALM is already up roughly six-fold in a year, to a market capitalisation around $5.6 billion. A great deal is already in the price.
So the premium section is the work we’d actually want before committing capital:
The valuation forensics — what tungsten price and what Phase 2 ramp the current $5.6bn market cap is implicitly discounting, and the scenarios where it’s cheap versus priced for perfection.
The downstream optionality — the planned tungsten-oxide processing plant, the adjacent molybdenum deposit, the “Korean Trinity” integrated chain — and how much of it we’d pay for today versus treat as a free option.
The offtake and contract structure — who is actually committed to buy this output, and how bankable those commitments are.
The catalyst calendar into 2027 — Phase 2, the NDAA deadline, the oxide-plant decision — and which one is the real re-rating trigger.
And the bear case we take seriously — China loosening the whitelist, the APT price mean-reverting, single-asset and single-jurisdiction concentration, and the plain momentum risk in a stock that has already 6-bagged.
We’ll lay out exactly how we’d size it, where we’d want to enter, and the level at which the risk/reward stops working…