Why Tungsten Is the Most Overlooked Trade in the Market Right Now
original source: https://www.readplaza.com/articles/why-tungsten-is-the-most-overlooked-trade-in-the-market-right-now
Good read, this is the full pasted article:
Over the past few months, our focus has largely been on precious metals.
But in a market like this, things shift quickly, and getting too attached to one sector is how opportunities get missed. We are in the business of making money, not picking favourites.
While we still think there is a lot more upside left in gold and silver, it would be doing ourselves and you a disservice if we did not evolve with the market and stay on the prowl for the next best setups.
That brings us to tungsten.
You have probably been hearing more about it lately, and for good reason. Prices have been moving aggressively, but more importantly, it may be one of the most structurally sound setups in the market today.
In this article, we will break down what tungsten is, where demand comes from, what is driving the move, and which public companies actually give you exposure.
There are not many.
So if you are trying to understand this space without getting lost in the weeds, this should give you a clean starting point and a clear way to think about how to play it.
What even is it?
Tungsten is a metal, but not one most people ever think about.
It does not sit in vaults like gold or get talked about on financial news. It is used behind the scenes, inside the tools and systems that keep industrial production moving.
What makes it different is its physical properties. Tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal, it is extremely dense, and it holds its strength under heat and pressure better than almost anything else. That combination is what makes it so useful.
Most of it does not get used in pure metal form. Instead, it gets turned into tungsten carbide, which is where the real demand comes from. Tungsten carbide goes into cutting tools, drill bits, mining equipment, and industrial machinery that needs to stay sharp and hold up under stress. If you are cutting steel, drilling rock, or running heavy manufacturing, there is a good chance tungsten is involved somewhere in that process.
And importantly, it is not something that is easily substituted. When a tool needs tungsten, there are not many alternatives that perform the same way.
Beyond industrial tooling, tungsten is also critical in defense, where it is used in armor-piercing munitions, missile components, and aircraft counterweights because of its exceptional density. And unlike the tungsten sitting in a worn-out drill bit that can eventually be recycled, the tungsten going into munitions is consumed and gone. It does not come back into the system.
A less talked about but increasingly important demand driver is semiconductors. Modern chip architectures rely on tungsten for interconnects, barrier layers, and thermal management systems. And because tungsten represents such a small fraction of total chip production costs, semiconductor buyers remain largely insensitive to how high the price goes. That makes that demand very sticky regardless of where the market trades.
So while this is not a metal people interact with directly, it sits right in the middle of industrial production, defense, and advanced technology. That is the key to understanding it. This is not a metal driven by investor hype or speculation. It is tied directly to real world activity across multiple sectors, and in several of those sectors, there is simply no substitute.
Current market dynamics
The first thing you need to understand is that demand was already firm before any of this started. About 60% of tungsten consumption in the U.S. alone goes into hard tooling and wear applications, so this was a healthy market before defense demand and geopolitics entered the picture.
The issue has always been supply, and specifically where that supply comes from. China produced about 67,000 tonnes of tungsten in 2025 out of roughly 85,000 tonnes globally.
That number alone tells you how little sits outside the Chinese system to begin with. And then governments made it worse.
China shuts the door
The U.S. raised tariffs on several tungsten products from China at the end of 2024. China responded in February 2025 by putting export controls on selected tungsten items, requiring exporters to obtain government licenses before shipping. The market impact was immediate and brutal.
Tungsten APT exports out of China collapsed. Shipments that came in at 103 tonnes in January 2025 dropped to 20 tonnes in February when the controls were announced, and then went to zero in March, April, and May. By the end of 2025, total APT exports had fallen nearly 70% year over year. China went from being the supplier the world depended on to barely shipping anything at all.
Then in January 2026, Beijing tightened things further by launching the 2026 Dual-Use Items Catalog, which explicitly listed tungsten oxides and carbides under strict military export controls and concentrated all export rights in state-backed entities. Independent traders and foreign intermediaries were effectively frozen out of the supply chain entirely.
The structural reality is stark. Chinese export volumes have fallen roughly 40% year over year since the controls came in, and there is simply not enough supply outside China to fill that gap. The market outside the Chinese system is fragmented, with Vietnam, Russia, and a handful of smaller producers collectively accounting for a few thousand tonnes per year. Even if every one of those producers ramped up output tomorrow, it would not come close to replacing what China used to ship.
And this is the important part that often gets missed: new supply takes time. Even if a project in Australia, Spain, or the United States gets approved and funded today, it is realistically two or more years before meaningful new Western production reaches the market. The squeeze is not going away quickly.
The Iran war adds fuel
And then you layer the Iran war on top of that.
Tungsten is used in munitions and other defense systems, and unlike industrial tooling, that material does not come back into the system once used. A worn-out drill bit can eventually be recycled. A missile cannot. So now you have another source of demand pulling on a market that was already tight.
Reuters reported on March 23 that the war over Iran, stacked on top of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, is burning through U.S. tungsten stocks. The Pentagon had already gone looking for fresh supplies of 13 critical minerals including tungsten the day before the strikes began. The war did not create the squeeze from scratch, but it has clearly accelerated it. Project Blue estimates that tungsten consumption tied to defense applications like helicopters, fighter jets, and ammunition could increase 12% this year alone.
There is also a hard regulatory deadline coming that most people are not tracking. Under NDAA requirements that kick in January 2027, defense manufacturers will have to demonstrate they understand the origin of their tungsten supply chain and can prove NDAA compliance. That creates a forced urgency around U.S. and allied-nation sourcing that does not go away regardless of where prices trade short term. Companies with domestic or friendly-nation tungsten assets are going to look very different to defense procurement teams over the next 12 to 18 months.
Price performance
The price side is harder to follow than gold or copper because tungsten does not trade off one clean live benchmark. Different tungsten products trade across the chain, so most people use APT pricing as the easiest guide.
Source: Fastmarkets, Tungsten APT 88.5% WO3 min, fob main ports China, $/mtu WO3, MB-W-0003
The move has been extraordinary. APT was around $900 to $940 per mtu at the start of January 2026. By late March it had pushed to roughly $2,800 to $3,150 per mtu, based on pricing from Almonty Industries' tracker. That is a more than tripling in under three months, coming off an already massive 170%+ jump in 2025.
Zooming out, APT has now risen over 550% since China first placed tungsten products on its export control list in February 2025. Monthly price gains that averaged 15 to 20% through the back half of 2025 accelerated to 25 to 40% monthly increases in the first quarter of 2026, as inventory depletion triggered panic buying across industrial users.
The market has essentially been in a full structural repricing. Buyers are adapting to a world where the supply they used to depend on is simply not available anymore. Analysts who follow it closely note a "rising-easily, falling-hardly" phenomenon: the metal climbs aggressively but barely retreats, because the supply gap is not temporary. It is structural. Unless recycling rises significantly or new non-China supply comes online faster than expected, that dynamic likely stays in place for years.
Tungsten stocks to watch
This is where it gets interesting, because the public markets are thin on ways to actually access this. There are not many names, and they range from near-term producers already delivering into the market to earlier-stage companies sitting on assets that matter a lot more now than they did a year ago.
Here is a quick snapshot before we go into each one:
$ALM (Almonty Industries) - The clearest near-term production story. Phase 1 at Sangdong in South Korea is live, Phase 2 in development. Already supplying munitions production in Pennsylvania.
$EQR (EQ Resources) - Two operating mines across Australia and Spain. Steady production exposure with downstream ambitions.
$GUARD (Guardian Metal Resources) - U.S.-focused. Defense Production Act funding, Nevada resource base, earlier stage but strategically positioned.
$FWZ (Fireweed Metals) - One of the largest high-grade tungsten deposits in the Western world. Fresh $61.5M raise with JX Advanced Metals as a strategic investor.
$TUNG (American Tungsten) - Restarting a past-producing Idaho mine with existing infrastructure. Pure domestic U.S. supply chain play.
Almonty Industries
Ticker: ALM (NASDAQ) | AII (TSX)
Almonty is the name with the clearest production ramp in the group, and it is the one that already has the most direct exposure to where tungsten prices are trading right now.
It already has production from Panasqueira in Portugal, but Sangdong in South Korea is the piece that changes the scale of the story. Phase 1 moved into production in March 2026 and is designed to process about 640,000 tonnes of ore per year for roughly 2,300 tonnes of tungsten concentrate annually. Phase 2 is targeted for 2027 and is expected to roughly double that output. The company's CEO has noted that U.S. authorities have already reached out regarding material availability, and almost half of the South Korean output has been allocated to munitions production in Pennsylvania.
With Almonty you are not just getting existing tungsten production. You are getting one of the only major non-China projects already moving product into a market that desperately needs it. Analysts at D.A. Davidson, Oppenheimer, and B. Riley have all raised price targets in recent months, and the stock has reflected that, running hard off its lows over the past year.
The company has also been expanding its U.S. footprint, acquiring the Gentung Browns Lake tungsten project in Montana and closing a $129M financing to fund development activity across its portfolio. For investors who want the most direct, production-stage exposure to this trade, Almonty is the name that fits that criteria most cleanly.
EQ Resources
Ticker: EQR (ASX)
EQ Resources is another name worth knowing because it already has operating tungsten exposure across two mines, Mt Carbine in Australia and Barruecopardo in Spain. Together, those operations produced 38,292 mtu in Q4 2025 alone, so this is a company with meaningful real-world throughput already in place.
What makes EQ a bit different is that the story is less about one giant production ramp and more about steady, diversified exposure to tungsten through an existing operating base. Two jurisdictions, two mines, production today. In a market where supply outside China has become the central focus, that foundation matters.
The other part to watch is what EQ does beyond the mine level. The company has been signaling interest in moving further downstream into products like ferrotungsten, which could matter if more of the pricing strength keeps showing up further along the value chain rather than just in raw concentrate. If they execute on that, you are looking at a company capturing more of the margin on both ends.
Guardian Metal Resources
Ticker: GMTL (NYSE) | GMTLF (OTC)
Guardian is one of the cleaner ways to get exposure to future U.S. tungsten supply. The company is not producing yet. Its main asset is Pilot Mountain in Nevada, hosting 12.53 Mt at 0.27% WO3 along with copper, silver, and zinc credits. It also owns Tempiute, another Nevada tungsten asset. So when you look at Guardian, the point is not current revenue. The point is that it controls a meaningful U.S. resource base at a moment when the U.S. is paying serious attention to where its tungsten supply is going to come from.
Two things help frame the opportunity. First, Guardian received a $6.2 million award under the Defense Production Act to advance Pilot Mountain toward a pre-feasibility study. That is not just money, it is a signal that the U.S. government is actively trying to develop domestic tungsten capacity and is backing specific assets to do it. Second, the company has a potential offtake link with Global Tungsten and Powders, which suggests early processor-level interest in eventually buying material from the project.
The NDAA compliance deadline coming in January 2027 makes names like Guardian increasingly relevant to defense procurement timelines. This is still an earlier-stage company that has to advance through studies, permitting, and financing before any of that turns into production. But the combination of government backing, a Nevada resource base, and a tightening regulatory window for domestic sourcing puts Guardian in a spot that is going to get more attention.
Fireweed Metals
Ticker: FWZ (TSX-V)
Fireweed is the bigger-picture tungsten name in the group.
This is not about production showing up soon. It is about owning one of the largest high-grade tungsten deposits in the Western world before it gets properly valued in a market that now cares deeply about Western supply. The Mactung project in Yukon contains 41.5 million tonnes grading 0.73% WO3 in the indicated category, plus another 12.2 million tonnes at 0.59% WO3 in inferred. Those are exceptional numbers for a tungsten asset outside China.
The project is moving, just on a longer development timeline. Fireweed started an updated feasibility study in March 2026 with an expected completion in early 2027. Mactung also completed its environmental assessment back in 2014, so this is not starting from zero on the permitting side.
And then they went out and raised $61.5 million in late March 2026, with JX Advanced Metals coming in as a strategic investor with part of that capital going toward Mactung. A strategic investor of that caliber choosing to anchor a raise into a tungsten asset right now tells you something about how serious institutional buyers are taking this supply story. Huge asset, fresh capital, meaningful strategic backing. For investors comfortable with a longer development horizon, Fireweed is hard to ignore.
American Tungsten
Ticker: TUNG (OTC)
American Tungsten is built around the IMA Mine in Idaho, a past-producing U.S. tungsten asset that has been sitting idle and is now being brought back into the conversation at exactly the right time. The project comes with significant pre-existing infrastructure including historic underground development, road access, power, and water rights, along with years of historical drilling and exploration work. The company is not starting from scratch.
The investment case is straightforward: this is a domestic U.S. tungsten asset with infrastructure already in place, being reactivated at a moment when the U.S. government is actively trying to reshore critical mineral supply chains and defense manufacturers face a hard compliance deadline in January 2027. American Tungsten has also received approval to join the U.S. Defense Industrial Base Consortium, which connects private-sector companies directly with Department of Defense supply chain initiatives. That is not a minor detail.
The company is currently drilling, has been testing the tailings left on site, and has talked about the potential for small-scale production sooner than a greenfield project would usually allow. It is smaller and earlier than Almonty or EQ, but the domestic U.S. angle combined with the existing infrastructure base makes it a legitimate option for investors who want exposure to the idea of American tungsten supply coming back online.
The bottom line
Tungsten is not a speculative story dressed up as a structural one. It actually is a structural one.
The supply problem is real and it is not going to fix itself quickly. China controls the vast majority of global production and has made it abundantly clear that it intends to use that position strategically. The markets outside China are fragmented, underdeveloped, and years away from being able to meaningfully replace what used to flow freely. Meanwhile, demand is pulling from multiple directions at once: industrial tooling, defense consumption that does not recycle, semiconductor manufacturing that barely flinches at price, and now active military conflict burning through stockpiles.
Add in the NDAA compliance deadline hitting in January 2027 and you have a forced urgency around Western sourcing that is not going away regardless of where prices trade short term.
The public market options are limited, which is actually part of what makes this interesting. A small number of companies are positioned to benefit from a squeeze in a market that most investors are not paying attention to yet. That window does not stay open forever.
As always, do your own research, size positions appropriately, and understand what you own. But if you have been looking for the next sector with genuine structural tailwinds underneath it, tungsten deserves a serious look.
