Almonty Taps Spanish Tailings for 1,720-Tonne Tungsten Offtake as Western Buyers Race the 2027 Clock

Almonty struck a multi-year take-or-pay deal for at least 1,720 tonnes of tungsten trioxide from Spanish tailings, with Sandvik's Austrian unit as buyer.

Western manufacturers scrambling to lock down tungsten supplies outside Asia have found an unlikely source: the leftover rock on a dormant Spanish mine site. Almonty Industries has struck a multi-year take-or-pay agreement covering at least 1,720 tonnes of tungsten trioxide recovered from historical tailings at its Los Santos property, roughly 50 kilometres south of Salamanca.

The buyer is Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten, the Austrian subsidiary of Sweden's Sandvik group, which operates the only fully integrated tungsten smelter outside Asia and Russia at Sankt Martin im Sulmtal. Under the deal, Almonty receives a conditional one-time payment of 3 million US dollars for the exclusive offtake rights, with the funds earmarked for the technical work needed to restart tailings processing.

That 1,720-tonne commitment represents about a fifth of the total estimated tailings inventory at the Spanish site, which has sat in care and maintenance since February 2020. Because the material has already been extracted, Almonty can sidestep the permitting and development hurdles of conventional mining. CEO Lewis Black has said mobile processing units should compress approval timelines noticeably, and the company is weighing whether to replicate the template at its Panasqueira mine in Portugal and at other European locations.

Washington's Deadline Reshapes the Calculus

The timing is no accident. From 1 January 2027, strict US defence procurement rules take effect that shut out tungsten sourced from China, Russia, North Korea and Iran all the way down to the mine level. That leaves allied producers and processors hunting for verified non-Asian supply chains — a gap Almonty is positioning itself to fill.

The numbers explain the urgency. According to US officials, China accounts for roughly 85 percent of the global tungsten market, while the US Geological Survey confirms the United States has no active commercial tungsten mining on its own soil. Washington has responded by channeling money into alternatives: the Department of Defense announced more than 450 million US dollars in financing for the Elmet Group, taking convertible preferred equity in a move that underscores how critical secure raw material flows have become.

A Wider Footprint Takes Shape

The Spanish arrangement slots into a broader international build-out. Almonty brought its flagship Sangdong tungsten project into production just over a month ago, and on Monday it approved the creation of a joint venture in Rwanda, extending its resource base to another continent.

The company has been just as active on the capital markets. It delisted from the Australian Securities Exchange roughly two weeks ago, while Jefferies initiated coverage of the stock around the same period. A share buyback programme was approved about a month earlier, a signal of management's confidence in the longer-term trajectory.

Analysts Cheer, the Tape Shrugs

Wall Street greeted the offtake warmly. D.A. Davidson reiterated its buy rating and kept its 33.00 US dollar price target on Almonty.

Trading in Germany told a cooler story. The shares changed hands at 12.01 euros, down 2.4 percent on the day, though they remain up 51 percent since the start of the year. Friday's close of 12.07 euros put the year-to-date gain at 52 percent, with the stock now consolidating well below its 52-week high of 20.61 euros.

For European processors and government buyers alike, the value of the deal lies less in the headline figure than in its provenance. With US procurement restrictions bearing down, tungsten with a documented, non-Asian origin is becoming a strategic asset in its own right — and Almonty has just converted a pile of old mine waste into exactly that.