The 24-Month Countdown to Save the Western Tungsten Supply Chain
Facing a critical supply chain collapse, one mining CEO explains why the Western sector must embrace "precompetitive collaboration" before foreign dominance becomes permanent.
Corporate cutthroats and hostile takeovers are the usual hallmarks of big industry, but in the obscure yet hyper-critical world of tungsten mining, survival currently demands something far stranger: actively cheering for the competition. Lewis Black, the President and CEO of Almonty Industries (TSX: AII | NASDAQ: ALM), has publicly stated he is rooting for his direct rivals to succeed over the next 24 months. This is not a sudden pivot to corporate altruism. Rather, it is a matter of naked self-preservation in a market teetering on the edge of a structural collapse. Without new, operational Western mines coming online to meet global demand, the entire market faces a catastrophic contraction, leaving even established producers standing alone with no one to sell their materials to.
The root of this impending crisis lies in a global supply chain severely out of touch with modern geopolitical realities. For decades, Western industrial customers grew comfortably reliant on an endless pipeline of cheap Chinese tungsten, a dynamic that fattened profit margins and made procurement decisions blissfully simple. That era is definitively over. Driven by its own insatiable domestic demand and a stark refusal to continue subsidizing foreign industrial competitors, China has fundamentally altered the flow of raw materials. Yet, rather than aggressively helping to build a localized Western supply chain, many buyers are simply sitting on their hands, doing the bare minimum while hoping the old days of abundant, low-cost Asian supply will magically return.
Their hesitation to invest locally is not entirely without merit, as the mining sector has a notoriously dismal track record when it comes to keeping its promises. The core issue plaguing the Western tungsten supply chain is not a lack of geological deposits, but a profound lack of execution. Industry analysis reveals a staggering failure rate, with more than four out of five large mining developments running late and severely over budget. Cost overruns of 25 to 37 percent frequently rear their heads as early as the front-end engineering design phase, with final overruns regularly breaching the 40 percent mark. These compounding failures, born of poor planning, geological uncertainty, and extensive permitting delays, mean that capital is routinely squandered by operators who are historically better at raising funds and telling a compelling story than actually pulling rocks out of the ground.
If this cycle of broken promises continues, industrial customers will be forced into a corner. Instead of importing raw tungsten to manufacture goods locally, they will bypass the raw materials market entirely and begin purchasing finished products directly from China. This shift would not just fail to relieve the West’s dependency on foreign adversaries; it would systematically strip away North American and European manufacturing capabilities for good.
To avert this slow-motion disaster, Black suggests the mining industry borrow a page from the playbooks of the telecommunications, pharmaceutical, and semiconductor sectors. In those highly complex, capital-intensive fields, bitter rivals frequently engage in precompetitive collaboration. By working together at the foundation level to build shared infrastructure, research, and basic standards, much like the legendary Sematech initiative did for the US semiconductor space, companies can stabilize the underlying ecosystem before returning to cutthroat commercial competition.
The clock is undeniably ticking. The Western tungsten sector has a brief, 24-month window to drastically improve its operational discipline and prove that it can move projects from glossy conceptual pitch decks to reliable, sustainable production. Capital must be deployed with strict accountability, and companies must prioritize actual delivery over short-term market milestones. If the industry fails to establish a credible, functioning supply base soon, the market will inevitably shrink. And in a shrinking market, there are absolutely no winners, only a shared, self-inflicted obsolescence.
Source: Black, Lewis. "Why I need my competitors to succeed." Almonty Industries, April 5, 2026.