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Welcome back – and hello to all our new subscribers. Plenty has happened these past two weeks, so let’s get into it. We start at Sangdong.
My contractor thinks he’s Michelangelo
My finished grade at Sangdong is approaching 50 percent. Last time I sat down to write this newsletter it was 40, so we’re heading the right way.
Anyone who has built a real mine knows what comes next. And I mean a real one – most of what gets called a mine out there is a Lego set constructed by a three-year-old. The serious operations, the BHP and Rio sort, go through exactly what we’re going through now: a long silence after commissioning, while you iron out everything you paid good money to get right the first time and didn’t. Then one day, a ta-da moment. We’re still in the silence, and I am glad of it, because that’s where the work gets done. We went to 24-hour running on the first of November, three shifts staffed and on. Ten hours in, something broke and we shut it down. We re-opened two hours later though. Nobody who has commissioned a plant is surprised by that. It’s like driving 100 miles to your vacation and having to pull over every few minutes because the luggage you didn’t strap down keeps coming off the roof. You’ll still get to the beach – but the journey will drive you mad.
This week’s culprit is a filter press built to move 80 tons an hour that is managing 40. So I’ve bought a giant second-hand one in Korea – and this is the great advantage of running a mine in a dense, industrialized peninsula. Everyone carries inventory, so you can go and pick up almost any part you need off the shelf. It’s easier to find a filter press here than a parking space in Seoul. Now I just have to pour a concrete base and drop it in. My contractor tells me, like Michelangelo, that you cannot rush this sort of form and beauty. Michelangelo had the sense to work high on a platform, out of reach – the Pope was afraid of heights. Had the Pope been able to climb up to the top of the Sistine Chapel, I suspect beauty would have moved along a good deal faster. This is what commissioning looks like. You knock it off, one broken thing at a time.
Tungsten markets
Michael Dornhofer, ISBP – assessment as of 6 November, 2026
Tungsten prices are still not moving substantially. In my assessment, the Fastmarkets western APT notation has eased only marginally over the past two weeks – around 2%.
Western CIF Rotterdam levels look flat to me, while Chinese domestic prices appear to be firming again. The gap between Chinese domestic and western prices remains huge. But because of the “firewall” created by the Chinese export-license system, there are still no intermediates arriving on the western spot market.
I know that some customers still pay about 3000 USD/mtu for APT and oxide, so in my eyes the notation should not be dropping. It is also well known that some Chinese exporters receive export licenses for deliveries to selected western customers, and can therefore supply them with WC and tools. These volumes are very limited and cannot, by far, satisfy western demand. What is even more of a problem, and a risk, is that the Chinese Ministry of Commerce decides which western company gets material, and at what price.
In my eyes, deliveries selected by a Chinese ministry should not be the basis for a notation that is supposed to show the price of APT physically available on the spot market – in Rotterdam, Baltimore or elsewhere in the west.
This shows how important it is that the west becomes independent of Chinese supply, and of Chinese politics and policy.
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.
Why scrap and primary need each other
A US recycler called Tungco said something generous about us the other week in the Korean press – that mining and recycling belong on the same side. I checked under my car before I started it that evening. You don’t often get praise from recyclers. You don’t often get anything from recyclers. But they’re right, and most people miss why. And in the interest of detente, I’ve always liked Tungco.
Recycling has one obvious weakness: it needs primary to begin with. There’s nothing to recycle until someone digs it out of the ground, so it can never be a closed loop. Scrap depends on primary, and primary’s price depends on scrap. A strange set of bedfellows, but there it is. The West has never lacked scrap – America has moved to keep what it has at home for defense. The missing piece is the plants to convert it, and those only run with fresh ore alongside.
When the China supply dried up last year, the reason half the industry didn’t go under was scrap. It didn’t fill the hole, but it meant you weren’t all going to drown on the same day. I never thought I’d say a kind word about scrap dealers. On traders, my view hasn’t shifted an inch. But the recyclers and I need each other, and Tungco was honest enough to say it first.
The Montanan way
Regular readers will know we’ve taken on a dormant tungsten site in Montana. One reason I like the state is that nobody there is putting on an act. Whether someone’s a Democrat or a Republican barely comes up – they’re Montanans first. Just nice and calm, normal folk. Okay, they eat the odd rattlesnake, but they’re good people, and the ones who’ll eventually work the mine already live there.
So we’re doing this the Montanan way and taking it slow and steady. The budgeting’s done and the deposit’s solid. We’ll open when the permits allow – and keep building our community ties in the meantime. We recently bought a cow at the state fair, to be shared with the school, and I offered to name the rather bulky heifer after myself – after all, it’s good for children to have an animal they can relate to in the petting zoo. The principal put me straight on where this cow was headed though.
My aim for Gentung is simple: to be the first person to produce tungsten in the United States in 30 years, and I think I’m going to do it. The old workings left a stack of tailings and a plant to run them through, so I’m not starting from a hole in the ground. If I were a betting man, I’d put money on us beating everyone out of the gate. First US tungsten in three decades. That would be a fine day.
Tungsten isn’t like rare earths – here’s why
You’ll probably have seen China announce an export ban and then pull it before it bites, time and again. Watch which metal it does that with. It’s rare earths and graphite. Never tungsten.
There’s a reason. Rare earths aren’t rare. The deposits sit on every continent and everyone knows the West could produce them if it had to. A ban you call off costs China nothing and hands it a bargaining chip – a handbag fight over something nobody’s truly short of.
Tungsten doesn’t work like that. It’s scarce in China and scarce in the West, with no comfortable reserve waiting to change the game. And it sits in almost everything that moves, from the car you drove this morning to the aircraft over your head. Threaten tungsten and the message is blunt – no more cars, no more planes, no more AI. You don’t wave something that big around to win a point of leverage. So the on-off theater stays on the materials people have plenty of and simply haven’t developed. Tungsten is too essential for games.
Opinion
The ban that’s not a ban
Wait as long as you like for China to ban tungsten exports. It won’t – and it doesn’t need to. They never banned a thing. They set the bar for an export permit so high that nobody can clear it and wrapped the whole thing in language about peaceful purposes. As a peace-loving nation, China simply can’t allow its tungsten to end up in military hands. Very noble, chaps.
The cleverness is in what they ask of you. To export at all, you must prove a negative – such as the vehicle braking part you make from tungsten will never be part of an armored vehicle. Of course, you can’t show that without opening your company to China: your customers, your volumes, the lot. The paperwork reveal is essentially a Chinese corporate intelligence operation. Who needs hackers when the application form hands it over?
And because nothing is technically banned, there’s nothing for the WTO to grab hold of. China calls it peaceful, bows a little, and keeps the door closed. A ban without a ban. I’d call it cynical if it weren’t so beautifully built.
Which is why waiting for this to ease is the wrong game. There’s no ban to lift and no tariff to haggle down. The only tungsten worth relying on is the kind that never needs a Chinese permit in the first place.
What I’m reading
Is this the end of the Cybertruck?
Elon Musk is winding down the Cybertruck. He sold it as apocalypse-proof and bulletproof, then the “armored” glass shattered on stage at the 2019 reveal. It launched promising 250,000 sales a year and did about 20,000 last year. Even as a car guy, I was never tempted. You can wrap a vehicle in stainless steel and make it look like something from Blade Runner, but a truck still has to be a truck and do the dull jobs people buy one for. The BBC has the story.
Apple feeling the crunch
Flash memory – the storage chips in every phone and laptop – has suddenly got expensive, as reported by the WSJ, because AI data centers are snapping it up by the shipload. For twenty years the opposite was true: prices only fell, and Apple, which bought around a fifth of the world’s supply, used that muscle to squeeze its suppliers hard. It made them open their books so it could check nobody got a better deal, and audited them so often it even negotiated a bulk discount with Deloitte. Now the power has flipped. The big AI buyers take twice what Apple does and will pay whatever it takes, so the chipmakers finally set the price. I’ve spent a career on the supplier’s side of deals like that, so forgive me a small smile. The buyer who assumes the seller will always fold does fine – right up until the metal, or the memory, runs short. After that, it’s the seller who names the number.
The word of the year
Dictionary.com has named its word of the year, and it’s “maxxing” – doing a single thing to the absolute hilt. The internet has run with it: there’s cozymaxxing, and even nonnamaxxing, which apparently means living like an Italian grandmother. I had to have that one explained to me twice. But I’ll own the idea. I’ve been tungstenmaxxing for decades – one metal, while the rest of the industry chased a bit of everything. Turns out the kids have finally helped put a name to it.
In the media
For a metal the market ignored a few years ago, tungsten is now good copy. ZeroHedge covered us twice recently – once on the futures market finally coming to tungsten, and once on the Wall Street desks that turned up to our investor day. The analysts who couldn’t find tungsten on a periodic table are now very keen to hear about it. Welcome aboard.
Thanks for reading
Putting this edition together, with so much of it about who’s squeezing whom, got me thinking about what a good way of doing business looks like. For me, it’s this. Once a year I have lunch with one of my oldest customers, in the same restaurant, over the same meal. We strike the deal for the year ahead, then shake on it after the obligatory grumble about the price. We bring each other gifts (his is always better than mine) and we both go away happy. That’s how a supplier and a customer should be.
See you in two weeks.