Antimony & Tungsten

These two metals share a sheet because they share a situation. Neither is large, neither trades on an exchange, both are dominated by China, and both were turned into instruments of trade policy within a few months of each other. They are also both, in their particular niches, very hard to substitute, which is what makes the concentration matter.

Antimony is a metalloid whose largest commercial use is flame retardancy. Antimony trioxide is compounded into plastics, textiles, and electronics housings, where it works with halogenated compounds to slow ignition, and it is written into fire-safety standards, which makes it hard to design out. It also hardens lead-acid battery grids, appears in semiconductors, and, most sensitively, is used in munitions, reportedly across more than two hundred types, along with armour-piercing ammunition and night-vision equipment. China accounts for roughly 48 percent of mine production and about 74 percent of trioxide refining capacity, and the refining number is the one that binds.

Tungsten is the metal of extremes: the highest melting point of any metal, around 3,422 degrees Celsius, and exceptional density and hardness. Most of it is consumed as cemented carbide, the material of cutting tools, drill bits, and mining and machining inserts, which makes tungsten a quiet input to essentially all metalworking. Its density makes it the material of choice for kinetic penetrators in armour-piercing munitions, and it appears in superalloys, electronics, and heavy counterweights. World production is small, roughly 78,000 tonnes in 2023, of which China supplied about 63,000, better than 80 percent of world supply. China imposed formal export controls on tungsten in February 2025.

The trade-policy sequence is worth setting out because it shows a deliberate pattern rather than a series of accidents. China restricted gallium and germanium first, then graphite in December 2023, then antimony in 2024 with an outright ban on exports to the United States that December, then tungsten in February 2025. Each step targeted a market where Chinese control of the processing stage was near-total and where Western alternatives would take years to build. Antimony shipments to the United States fell by something like 97 percent, and a metal that had been an industrial afterthought became a defence-procurement emergency.

The Western response runs into the same wall in both metals: the binding constraint is not ore, it is processing. There is antimony and tungsten mineralisation outside China, in Australia, Bolivia, Vietnam, Portugal, Spain, and elsewhere, and new projects are being pushed hard. But smelting antimony to trioxide and converting tungsten concentrate to ammonium paratungstate and then to carbide powder are specialised, capital-heavy, and environmentally demanding steps that were allowed to concentrate offshore over decades. Estimates for closing that gap run to years at best, and the ore price alone will not summon the plants.

Neither metal has a futures contract. The LME does not list them and no other exchange does either. Antimony trades on assessment, quoted in dollars per tonne for standard grades in Rotterdam and China. Tungsten is unusual in that it is conventionally priced not as metal but as ammonium paratungstate, quoted per metric tonne unit of tungsten trioxide contained, a convention that confuses everyone outside the trade. Both are sold on bilateral contract and spot lots through a small dealer community, and pricing is opaque enough that the assessments themselves become the subject of argument during a squeeze. A market with no exchange, no inventory of record, and one dominant supplier has no shock absorber at all, which is precisely what 2024 and 2025 demonstrated.