Bullets:
Industrial metals markets are melting down, as soaring demand from defense contractors and export bans from China result in skyrocketing prices.
Tunsten is a superhard, superdense material vital in the production of munitions, ballistics, and armor. It is also in high demand in mining and manufacturing.
China controls the world’s supply of tungsten, and also has half of the world’s proven reserves. Dual-use export bans on the metal have restricted its sale solely to civilian users of the metal, at the same time weapons stockpiles are drained for the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
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Report:
Good morning.
Industrial metals markets are melting down, from two directions. On the demand side, Pentagon contractors and other weapons makers are desperate to find new supplies, to build new weapons that will be sent over to the Middle East or Ukraine to be blown up the next day. For these companies, price is no object. Even before the newest war started in the Persian Gulf, defense contractors were scouring the world for tungsten to meet a double-digit percentage spike in demand.
Here is the one-year chart, from under $500 per ton to over $2,000, and we’ll say again that this move was before the Iran War, which has drained stockpiles so fast that the White House dragged the contractors for a meeting and told them to quadruple weapons production:
Tungsten is superdense, which makes it vital in the oil drilling and mining industries. Naturally that makes it a key component for missiles, armor-piercing munitions, and armor itself. That’s all on the demand side. China is the supply side. Beijing has a dual-use ban on their exports, so the Pentagon can’t get any from here.
China’s exports of tungsten overall dropped 40% last year, and those were exclusively to civilian users of the metal.
Now back to the military problem: Stockpiles of munitions are being used up, and contractors need all the tungsten they can find to make more. This company, Almonty, is setting up a new tungsten mine in South Korea, and hopes to send half of the output to Pennsylvania to build bombs. It will be the first US mine in years, even though it’s not in the United States.
Industry insiders have never seen markets like these. In some ways it’s similar to spot shortages, in the past, but those were temporary. New sources of supply can be brought online, or on the demand side, the high prices and shortages encouraged hoarding, and got engineers to work finding substitutes.
But Iran and China have scrambled all that up—thousands of drones and thousands of missiles and tens of millions of shells and small munitions—those all need tungsten. And the United States doesn’t produce any. This is from the National Geological Survey. Production of tungsten, year by year, since 2021, is zero. Net import reliance is greater than 50%, each year:
China was the number one import source from 2021-2024, and then came their export bans last February, 2025.
This is where the tungsten is:
Total tungsten output in 2025 was 85,000 tons. China was 67,000 tons, or over three fourths of the total. Proven global reserves of 4.7 million tons. China is more than half of that, at 2.5 million tons. Russia has 400,000. North Korea and Vietnam are China’s neighbors—friendly neighbors—so figure that three fourths of all the tungsten reserves on earth are in countries that aren’t disposed to help the Pentagon with their tungsten problem.
The story of tungsten is the same as for the other critical raw materials and metals. The Pentagon and the IDF are burning through them and need to build more, and the BRICS countries who have them in the ground don’t want to help.
So we get charts like that one, and headlines that inform us that the best performing investment since last February was not gold, not silver, not Nvidia stock, but a clump of tungsten sitting in your warehouse somewhere.
Be Good.
Resources and links:
Munitions Metal Tungsten Eclipses Gold, Copper in 557% Rally
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-15/munitions-metal-tungsten-outshines-gold-copper-in-557-rally
Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, Tungsten subindex
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-tungsten.pdf
Munitions metal tungsten outshines gold, copper in 557% rally
https://www.mining.com/web/munitions-metal-tungsten-outshines-gold-copper-in-557-rally/
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