The tungsten supply chain.

One country dominates

Tungsten is mined in only a handful of places, and the concentration is extreme. China produced roughly 67,000 of the roughly 85,000 metric tons mined worldwide in 2025 — about 80 percent — according to U.S. Geological Survey figures, and its share of downstream processing is even larger. The rest of the world's production is fragmented across Vietnam, Russia, Rwanda, Bolivia, Austria, and Spain, each contributing only a few thousand tons a year. The United States, for its part, has had no commercial tungsten mining since 2015. This is not a market with spare suppliers waiting in the wings: developing a new tungsten mine typically takes a decade or more from discovery to production, and the pipeline of new projects is thin. When one country controls four-fifths of supply, its domestic policies become everyone's market conditions.

APT: the price the industry watches

From mine concentrate, tungsten's journey runs through chemical processing to ammonium paratungstate — APT — the intermediate compound the whole industry uses as its price benchmark, the way copper traders watch COMEX. One mtu (metric ton unit) equals 10 kilograms of tungsten trioxide, containing about 7.93 kilograms of tungsten metal. APT is refined into tungsten oxide, then tungsten powder, then tungsten carbide powder, then the sintered parts in your tool crib. Watching the APT price is watching the water level for the entire tungsten economy: when APT spikes, everything downstream — powder, carbide parts, and eventually scrap — feels it. In early 2025 APT traded around $300 per mtu. By May 2026 it had reached roughly $3,185 per mtu — about a ninefold increase in twelve months — with Rotterdam prices climbing from about $1,100 in January 2026 past $2,200 in March toward $2,900–$3,200 by early July. For context, ferrotungsten roughly quadrupled over a similar span. These are commodity-benchmark moves on a scale the industry had not seen before.

How policy became price

The price spiral was not an accident of geology — it was policy. Beginning in February 2025, China imposed export licensing on tungsten, including APT, requiring exporters to obtain special licenses. In December 2025 it went further: only 15 firms were permitted to export tungsten in 2026 and 2027. In February 2026, exports of dual-use items to 20 Japanese entities were prohibited outright. Alongside the export curbs, China cut its 2025 tungsten mining quota by 6.5 percent, while rising domestic manufacturing consumed more of what was mined at home. The result: Chinese tungsten export volumes fell roughly 40 percent year-on-year, and analysts reported there simply were not enough raw materials outside China to replace the lost volume. Environmental inspections in the producing provinces of Jiangxi and Hunan added disruptions, and falling ore grades raised costs at the mine face. Meanwhile the United States layered on its own measures: baseline import duties on tungsten carbides sit at 5.5 percent, a Section 232 critical-minerals investigation has been examining processed critical minerals including tungsten, and in a striking move, the Bureau of Industry and Security began requiring U.S. sellers of tungsten waste and scrap to allocate 100 percent of monthly sales to domestic buyers for one year starting August 27, 2026 — an attempt to keep tungsten-bearing material inside the country. A U.S. defense procurement ban on Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and North Korean tungsten takes effect January 1, 2027, with rules reaching upstream to ore and feedstock, including recycled material.

Scarcity upstream is value downstream

When virgin tungsten gets expensive and hard to secure, two things happen that favor scrap holders. First, manufacturers and processors lean harder on recycled material — the zinc-process and chemical recycling routes that turn your inserts and sludge back into powder become economically essential rather than merely virtuous. Second, every holder of above-ground tungsten — which is exactly what a bucket of carbide scrap is — holds material the market increasingly needs. None of this means any particular lot has a fixed price; scrap is still evaluated on grade, form, quantity, and sorting. But the structural backdrop is the most supportive it has been in modern memory: concentrated supply, rising demand from defense and industry, long lead times, and governments treating tungsten as a strategic material. That is the market your scrap sells into. Send photos for today's price — quoted against the market as it stands right now, not last year's chart.

Carbide questions, answered.