Intelligence analyses covering supply across geopolitics, cybersecurity, finance, and technology domains.
4 analyses
Defense spending and China's export controls pushed tungsten prices 557% higher since 2025. Vietnam is the scalable alternative on paper — processing infrastructure gaps make it a fragile one in practice.
China controls 61% of rare earth mining and 91% of refining — and is now using that dominance as strategic leverage. A 557% tungsten price spike since 2025 is hitting military procurement with no fast substitutes.
The global tungsten market has entered 2026 in extreme volatility, driven by China's implementation of export controls on tungsten products following US trade disputes .
Mining rare earths is the easy part. Processing capacity is so concentrated that a single supply shock could paralyze defense systems, renewables, and advanced manufacturing simultaneously.