Tungsten outside China: what the universe actually looks like

Every Western buyer is asking the same question. Almost no one has counted the answer. We did, and the full register is a free download. The form is at the bottom of this page.

Pulse Intelligence · Version 2, 1 August 2026

Why this exists

On 1 January 2027, one clause of US defence procurement law changes by a handful of words. DFARS 252.225-7052 stops asking where tungsten was melted and starts asking where it was mined, for China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. The compliance question moves from the smelter to the mine, for a metal whose supply has sat in one country for a generation.

So the question every procurement officer, defence prime, policy team, fund manager and corporate development desk is now asking: who can credibly supply tungsten from outside China, and when?

That question is answerable. It just requires someone to count. Nobody had, so we did.

The Ex-China Critical Minerals Supply Register, Volume 1: Tungsten is every mining asset outside China where tungsten is the primary commodity, counted, staged, attributed and sourced. The full report is a free PDF.

What's inside

108 records · 20 countries · nine producing mines: built from a corpus that was already there.

• The universe, counted. 108 primary tungsten records outside China, deduplicated, each with owner, ownership type, stage, status and its own source. A further 441 assets carry tungsten only as a by-product.
• The funnel to nine mines. 108 records → 33 with a maiden resource → 22 with an economic study → 15 at pre-feasibility or better → nine producing (plus four on care and maintenance). Two-thirds of the ground has never declared a resource.
• "Outside China" and "not Chinese" are different screens. One of the nine producers, Boguty in Kazakhstan, sits under a two-layer Chinese ownership chain; a second, Dolphin in Tasmania, carries a Chinese royalty. An equity screen alone surfaces neither.
• The demand story, fact-checked. The 155mm shell, the Abrams penetrator, "defence is the demand story": three of the most-repeated claims don't survive their primary source. Roughly 60% of US tungsten goes into cutting tools, not weapons.
• The real bottleneck is the converter. About five APT converters operate outside China, two of them under one parent. A new Western mine has a very short list of buyers who can turn its concentrate into powder.
• The financing reality. Of 54 listed owners with price data, 44 are down over three months and 17 hold under six months of cash. The pipeline sits with companies the market has just re-priced downward.
• Two tungsten prices. Export licensing split the market: Chinese domestic concentrate halved from its March peak while export APT held at roughly double. The price that "halved" is not the one a Western buyer pays.
• What the count can't see. Russia, North Korea, Bolivia and the state-held operations a filings screen structurally cannot reach are declared plainly and are the subject of Volume 2.

The record behind every row

The register prints six columns because six columns is what a list can carry. Underneath, every asset sits on the same ten layers: identity, geology, ownership, shareholders, milestones, permits, studies, reserves, drilling and provenance, each traced to the filing it came from. The register is a snapshot; the platform updates daily.

This is Volume 1. Antimony, rare earths, tin and graphite are the same question asked of different rows. Which one would you want counted next?

Download the register

Ex-China Critical Minerals Supply Register, Volume 1: Tungsten. The full report, free as a PDF. Fill in the form below and we'll send it over, or comment TUNGSTEN on the LinkedIn post.

Less searching. More strategising.™

Asset counts, ownership, stage, status, study data, share price and publication volumes: Pulse Intelligence corpus as at 31 July 2026. Counts reflect assets where tungsten is the primary commodity unless stated otherwise. Sources outside the corpus, cited as such in the full register: DFARS 252.225-7052; USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026; GAO-24-106959; European Commission Critical Raw Materials study 2023; Fastmarkets; and operator disclosure for the three mines carried outside the filings universe (Nui Phao, Nyakabingo, Mittersill). Nothing here is investment advice.