The Chinese translation is being made; the original is shown for now.
We’ve mined tungsten for a long time, mostly in places and ways nobody wrote about. That’s changed. Suddenly the metal is a story and we’re in the middle of it. I’m still deciding whether I like the attention. Anyway, enough about me and my newfound fame, let’s get into what’s been happening.
It all comes down to permits
Everyone frets about where the tungsten price goes next, but the thing that decides when new supply turns up is the permit office. Until the permits come through, no new tungsten reaches the market. The quality of your deposit is beside the point. You can be sitting on the best orebody in the world, or a complete dog – until the paperwork says you can touch it, it stays in the ground.
And it’s never one permit. People picture a mining permit, an environmental permit, and away you go. That’s two items on a very long list. In America the average run is around 15 years. S&P put it even higher. In Europe there is no number to quote – you just wait, and the waiting seemingly has no end.
So when you hear that a wave of new supply is about to drag the price back down, ask who actually has the permits to produce it. In the West, almost nobody – not for years. The price will come down one day – but never to three digits again. Four digits is the new normal. And it’s China that will bring it down, with recycling that skips the permit queue entirely while the West is still filling in forms.
Tungsten markets
Michael Dornhofer, ISBP – assessment as of 09 October, 2026
In my assessment, Western APT now sits at around 2500 to 2900 USD/mtu WO3, with the lower end having slipped over the past week. I doubt that slip reflects any real trading. China still grants no export licences for tungsten intermediates, and the only independent APT producer in the West has not offered material on the spot market for several weeks. So how can the price fall when there is almost no APT on the market to price?
The answer is in the concentrate market. When the price rose nearly tenfold in 18 months, small mines around the world rushed to lift output. Some of that material comes from sources the West is not allowed to buy from, and China is taking it. The rest – from places like Africa, Mongolia and Bolivia – is being offered cheaply in the West. But the West’s APT and oxide plants are already running flat out to meet their long-term supply contracts – there is no spare capacity to take on extra concentrate, however cheap. So the converters pass, and the small mines drop their offers lower and lower.
None of this changes the real problem. The West still cannot produce enough APT and oxide to replace the volumes China no longer exports, and that shortage will not let the APT price fall far. Downstream, the squeeze is only tightening. And it is why a secured, long-term offtake is the most valuable thing a producer can hold right now: a guaranteed home for your material, whatever the spot market does.
My view is that a Western APT price should be based only on APT that is genuinely available in the West, and genuinely in the form of APT. Price it that way, and the direction would turn again quickly. I expect that before long.
Michael Dornhofer is founder of ISBP (Independent Supply Business Partner) in Graz, Austria. He has spent more than 20 years in tungsten, including 13 years at Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten, Sandvik’s tungsten business, and has worked as an independent agent and consultant to the tungsten and hard metal industry since 2019.
Rwanda starts shipping
Rwanda is already paying off. Three weeks after we signed, we’re collecting material, and from next month we will ship more than 100 tonnes a month – enough to make us the largest tungsten exporter in the country. We don’t mess around and have hit the ground running. Rwanda’s small miners are already pulling tungsten out of the ground, so we buy what they produce, ship it to Europe, and process it into something the industrial base can use. Every tonne is tagged and conflict-free, which is more than you can say for a good deal of what is moving through the market now.
This is only the beginning. We’re mapping the geology and looking at other options, and we’ll develop them if they stand up – which takes years. There are two ways to build a mine: the kind that ends in a scandal, and the kind that is still feeding families five generations later, the way Panasqueira has. We’re building the second.
The first cargo leaves the mountain
On 24 October, the initial commercial shipment of tungsten leaves Sangdong – the first the mine has produced in more than thirty years, after the years we spent rebuilding it.
The ramp is working. The grinding circuit is now running at full throughput, and getting the grind right was the one thing that kept me awake. It’s done, and recoveries are landing exactly where we expected. Things still break, of course – that is a ramp-up. The latest was three slurry pipes, damaged on installation, which flooded the water treatment plant. Naturally they were the one spare we didn’t have, so we flew replacements in from Europe, fitted them and got back to work. None of it is a surprise – we’ve brought mines back to life before.
Phase 2 is already moving. We are ordering the mills and the underground work has started, so the next stage goes up while the first finds its feet. The hard part is behind us. Now we run it.
The moly is already ours to mine
While tungsten gets all the attention, sitting alongside it at Sangdong is molybdenum – and it may be the simplest metal we ever bring to market. It’s already permitted under our tungsten licenses – no separate application, no new environmental studies. We can mine it now.
It’s also perfectly positioned since SeAH Steel is the second-largest consumer of molybdenum in the world – so my customer sits down the road. Currently he imports every tonne he uses, fully exposed to whatever happens between here and wherever it ships from. But I can get it to him by truck. No boats, no customs, no cargo stuck in an East Asian port – he sends a man in the morning and drives back with the material by lunch.
Moly will need its own plant, and it will look much like the Sangdong one, the same flotation process, so what we learn running one we put to work in the other. Alongside it we are building the plant the West lacks – the one that turns tungsten concentrate into the APT and oxide customers buy. The industry is busy trying to dig more ore; the harder shortage is the capacity to process it. We have the site identified, the regional government behind us and we aim to start building next year. The only thing still unsettled is the color of the building. Red and black is taken, so I’m open to suggestions.
What I’m reading
Burgers with a side of advertising
McDonald’s has worked out that it owns some of the most valuable advertising space in the world and has never sold a square inch of it. From August it began selling ad slots on its app, its kiosks and the menu boards above the till, across 450 US restaurants, with the aim of building a billion-dollar advertising business. Its chief marketing officer, Morgan Flatley, called it revenue “with little in the way of additional cost.” That’s the kind of line that makes a CEO sit up: a second income from the counter you already built, with the queue already standing in front of it.
The scooters that take notes
Every Bolt e-scooter carries accelerometers, gyroscopes and a camera to keep itself upright and serviced. Someone at the company asked what else that data was good for, and the answer turned out to be rather wonderful. In a pilot in Tallinn, the scooters graded how rough or smooth the ground was as they rode – 66,000 surface ratings across the city – and Bolt published the lot to the open map navigation apps use, so a wheelchair user can steer around the broken ground the rest of us never notice. They didn’t build a thing, the data was already there. That’s the clever part: it cost them almost nothing, and it hands something genuinely useful to people who need it.
Into the furnace
Figure makes the humanoid robots now working on BMW’s production line. When it retired the first generation, it didn’t want anyone taking them apart to copy the engineering inside, so it melted them. The company asked the internet how they should be disposed of, and Arnold Schwarzenegger popped up on their socials and said: “melt them”. Only one foundry, in Finland, would take the job – its furnace turned the robots into metal bars, now being machined into commemorative keepsakes for collectors. There’s something very modern about a company destroying its own creations with this much ceremony, then selling the remains. I admire the discipline of it. And I notice that even in the age of robots, when you absolutely must melt something down, you still call a foundry.
Opinion
Stop looking down, start looking up
Everyone is staring at the price on the way down. It was $3,000 an MTU, it’s $2,700, and from the noise you’d think we were heading for financial disaster. I look at the same number and see a fortune. For more than twenty years I sold tungsten at $250 to $350. Three years ago, if you had promised me $1,000 an MTU for the rest of my career in exchange for turning up to work in a red nose and clown shoes, I’d have taken the sartorial humiliation in a heartbeat. We are at $2,700 – nearly three times the price I’d have made a fool of myself to lock in. And I am supposed to panic because it came off $3,000.
So look at what’s happening. Next to nothing new is coming online. Scrap looks cheap today only because the traders panicked and dumped their inventories all at once. There is only so much of it. When Europe follows America and bans the export of scrap, as I expect it to, China will have to come back into the Western market for primary material and prices will climb again. Demand is about to jump too, as the defense primes wake up to how much tungsten they really need.
This will be a wild five or six years until China’s recycling matures and prices settle. It will also be very profitable. The mistake is to hoard. Stockpiling schemes like Project Vault assume there is spare material lying around to buy – there isn’t, because the industrial base needs every tonne the moment it’s made. The money these prices throw off should go into building a supply chain that can take a punch – the only insurance worth owning.
In the media
We set out where things stand in a shareholder letter and corporate update on 29 September, covering Sangdong’s first concentrate, Phase 2 and the buyback.
In Korea, the Korea Times reported Sangdong’s first tonne of salable concentrate and its move into commercial operation, noting the inspection certificate from the state mineral-resources body – national coverage of a mine the country has waited a long time to see running again.
And in Rwanda, KT Press covered the venture from Kigali’s side, framing the 25 percent government stake as the country’s step into non-Chinese tungsten supply for Western defense and aerospace.
Drop me a line
The best part of writing this is what comes back. Tell me what you’re seeing in your own corner of the market – I read every reply. Whether I write back is another matter: a response from me moves at roughly the speed of a mining permit.
See you in two weeks.