Tungsten (W)

Tungsten stays ranked #1 this week. The structural story hasn't changed — ~80% of global mine supply is China, there is no liquid exchange, and physical buyers are pricing off weekly Fastmarkets APT prints they can't audit. What HAS changed: our equity-proxy basket (Almonty) is up +46.8% over 90 days. That is the market telling you the tightness is priced in. Three non-aligned operations are active today, totaling ~5,100 tpa of concentrate-to-APT capacity: • Sangdong (KR, 2,500 tpa) — Almonty restart, Korean APT precursor, first production ramp • Panasqueira (PT, 1,100 tpa) — Almonty's historical cash producer, steady state • Mittersill (AT, 1,500 tpa) — Wolfram Bergbau, largely captive to Plansee downstream Global demand is roughly 80,000 tpa. The non-aligned capacity above covers ~6% of it. If you're a Western tooling OEM, defense supplier, or carbide manufacturer without a non-China source on contract, you are not covered. What to watch: (1) Almonty Sangdong ramp — commissioning updates drive the whole equity basket; (2) DPA Title III awards — DoD has been quietly seeding non-China APT; (3) China export licensing — a formal quota would crystallize the thesis overnight. If you're running >100 tpa of APT through a Chinese converter, your next quarterly review deserves a non-aligned line item. If you want help mapping your current APT supply to specific mines — a lot of 'non-China' inventory is Chinese APT with Vietnamese or Austrian paper — reply to this brief.