China named the tungsten price for 30 years. Not anymore

This weekend, for the first time in more than 30 years, a container of tungsten leaves Sangdong and starts the journey to a customer. For decades that mountain produced nothing and, once we are running around the clock, it will turn out 200 tonnes a month; let's call it six and a half to seven tonnes a day. I have waited a long time to write that sentence - this is a good weekend at Almonty Towers.

The West starts setting its own price

Two things happened to tungsten this month that have never existed since I've been selling it. The CME, the big Chicago exchange, said it will launch a tungsten futures contract next year. And S&P's Platts is proposing a separate price just for the tungsten that comes from outside China. That country has always set the number and the rest of us lived with it. Now the West is building the machinery to set its own.

The futures contract is the one that I'm excited about. I lobbied the exchanges to do this for years, long enough that I went from Mr. Black to "that guy from tungsten, tell him we're busy." The nagging was worth it. A futures contract lets a miner or a customer lock in a price and plan around it, instead of standing in the road waiting to see what the market does to them. You can hedge your inventory or lock the price on a sale before you've shipped a gram of it.

It also brings speculators, and that's good. People chasing a return read the fine print, and the market decides what the metal is worth, which is a great deal more than I trust my customers or, God help us, the traders to tell me.

So the loudest voices calling the top, the same traders moaning that the price is collapsing, will not mention the futures contract at all. A market you can hedge in punishes their favorite game, which is volatility. For once, this is a government idea that landed with people who know how to run an exchange. Welcome to the free market.

Tungsten markets

Michael Dornhofer, ISBP - assessment as of 24 October, 2026

In recent weeks, the tungsten prices stayed quite stable. In my assessment, Western APT CIF Rotterdam/Baltimore held on the high side, with only the low side easing by around 50 USD/mtu. The rest of the market held broadly flat, while on the Chinese domestic side indications firmed by around 6 %.

As there is still (nearly) no APT/Oxide coming out of China, the shortage of these intermediates carries on, and this will not change in the foreseeable future. In general, one can say that most tungsten raw material that physically (!) enters the spot market is still traded close to 3000 USD/mtu, or only slightly below.

There are some reports of sales contracts for Chinese oxide at lower prices. But as long as no export license is granted for this material, these figures remain only theoretical.

Recently, I have been asked very frequently about tungsten prices and how they are set. To be honest, we should not talk about a "tungsten price", but about the APT notation, published every Friday afternoon by Fastmarkets in London. Nearly all mid- and long-term contracts in the tungsten industry refer in their price formulas to this notation.

In my eyes, the reason the whole industry uses the Fastmarkets notation so widely, and no one uses the other price reporting agencies, is very simple. Everyone knows that once a week, always on a Friday, Fastmarkets reports two figures: a low and a high notation for APT CIF Rotterdam/Baltimore. The other agencies report different figures through the week, and sometimes even different figures on different pages of the same publication. That makes them difficult to use as a reference. And so Fastmarkets heavily influences, not to say sets, the tungsten price, up- and downstream..

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.

A second mine, 300 feet down

Sangdong is really two mines, stacked one on top of the other. The tungsten is on top. About 300 feet below it sits molybdenum, a separate mine in a separate industry that happens to share an address with us.

When we bought Sangdong it came with two ore bodies, tungsten and molybdenum, both drilled heavily by the previous owners. The trouble was that none of the old cores survived. So we're drilling again to confirm what we are sitting on. The tungsten came back matching the numbers we bought on, almost to the line, and the molybdenum is now doing the same. This is confirmation drilling. We already know what's down there - we're just proving it to the standard a resource report needs.

Because it sits right under a mine we already run, the economics are unusual. We drill the molybdenum from inside the tungsten workings rather than down from the surface, so it's cheaper and faster, and we expect to produce around 5,000 tonnes a year. We already have a buyer signed for the life of the mine, with a floor under the price and no ceiling over it, close enough that the material goes to him by road, and he will take up to a quarter of his feed from us.

One mine we can reach by walking through the other. Now that's efficiency.

The metal that fusion can't do without

At our investor day this week, Michael Dornhofer raised a subject I usually stay off: nuclear fusion. He knows the demand side better than I do, so let me pick up where he left off.

For 20 years it's been the one development every tungsten miner has watched for, because you can't build a fusion reactor without a great deal of tungsten. It lines the chamber where the reaction burns, 100 tonnes of it, maybe 200, in a single plant. And the reaction is so violent that it slowly turns that lining radioactive, so every two or three years the lining is torn out and replaced.

What waits on the other side is hard to overstate. Fusion is, in effect, free energy, endless and clean, and the designs put these plants beside the sea, which leaves you fuel for something like 150 million years. Whoever gets there first has won. The money knows it: Gates and Microsoft are pouring it in, and China, by most accounts, is further along than anyone. China plans in generations, and I suspect it wants its tungsten still in the ground when the generation that runs on fusion arrives.

You can see, then, why I keep quiet about it. If fusion comes, tungsten becomes more valuable than gold, the way it was in the 1950s, and whoever holds the West's supply of it becomes what the oil men were at the dawn of the oil age, or the uranium miners at the start of the nuclear one - the ones who ended up electing governments and retiring to a large mansion with their fifth wife. I would rather just ship product and keep my head down, while we wait for science fiction to become science fact.

What I'm reading

Taking a bite out of the competition

Carl's Jr, the American burger chain, ran a stunt in New Zealand through the agency TBWA that I thought was brilliant. Leave a one-star review for any rival burger joint, upload a screenshot, and Carl's hands you a free burger. They name no competitor and throw no punches. They simply take the complaints people have already made about everyone else and treat each one as an opening. A smart way to poke fun at your competition and get plenty of media attention at the same time. Anyone think this would work in the tungsten industry?

What the World Cup left behind

This summer's World Cup final drew 66.4 million viewers in the United States, the most-watched soccer match the country has ever seen. Nielsen has Premier League viewing among 18 to 34-year-olds up 20 percent so far this season. The game has taken root, and it has taken root young. I spend most of my weekends on the side of a pitch, watching my son and a pack of small children chase a ball in roughly the right direction, so I feel like I'm doing my bit to bring the beautiful game stateside. For decades Americans were told the game would never catch on over there. A generation just decided otherwise.

The memo nobody wrote

Amazon built its whole culture on the written word. Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint from his meetings and made people bring six-page memos instead, on the theory that you cannot write six clear pages without being forced to think first. A long-serving insider now argues that artificial intelligence has hollowed all that out: a machine writes the six pages in seconds, so the thinking the writing used to force never happens. Staff have started tagging documents "AI;DR" - if a model wrote it, a model can summarize it. I write this newsletter myself, and this is why. The writing (and thinking about writing) is where you find out whether you have a point. Let a machine write it and you still get your six pages, just not the part that made them worth reading.

Opinion

Why I won't take the money

This month another Western tungsten producer sold a large equity stake to the US government, and plenty of people cheered. I wouldn't do it, and it's worth saying why because that money is now being offered right across my industry, and each of us has to decide.

Government can help a miner in all the right ways. It can speed a permit. It can lean on the banks to take us seriously. What it shouldn't do is become a shareholder. A supplier and a customer are meant to sit on opposite sides of the table, each with a knife out, bargaining until you settle and shake hands. The day your customer, or your government, owns a piece of you, you can no longer reach for the knife. And they always have a bigger one.

It shows the moment there is a disagreement. Fall out with a government that owns your stock, and your big shareholders - the funds - head straight for the door. You end up working for the man, taking the price you are given. Worse, administrations change, and the next one can turn this one's investments against you. You are in business with the referee, and referees get swapped.

There is a line worth drawing, though. A subsidy paid after the fact for building a plant, as part of a nationwide industrialization program open to every sector, is a rebate: no conditions, no seat at your table and no one minds it. An equity investment made to build a plant for the benefit of the investor crosses all kinds of lines. One gives you back part of what you spent - the other buys a vote on how you spend it.

In the media

On the Northern Miner podcast, I talked with host Adrian Pocobelli about why the West is so short of tungsten, how decades of cheap Chinese production left everyone exposed, and what we're doing about it. .

Thanks for reading

Next week I'm in Atlanta for the Critical Minerals Forum, talking about human capital, from a presentation I'm still tinkering with. If you're there, come and find me. I'll be the one improvising. Otherwise, see you here in two weeks.