Since the beginning of 2025, despite facing trade frictions between China and the United States in the second quarter, my country’s manufacturing PMI has maintained a generally stable and positive trend.  my country’s manufacturing fixed asset investment also demonstrated resilience in 2025, with a cumulative year-on-year increase of 1.9% from January to November. In November 2025, my country’s cumulative production of metal cutting machine tools reached 783,000 units, a year-on-year increase of over 27.96%. Therefore, we predict that the tungsten industry will also maintain a high level of activity in 2025.

Looking at a longer time frame, with the acceleration of my country’s industrialization process and the national push for intelligent manufacturing, the market size of cutting tools has increased year by year. In the past ten years, the domestic cutting tool market size has increased by nearly 10 billion yuan. According to the statistics of the Tool Branch of the China Machine Tool & Tool Builders’ Association, in 2022, the size of my country’s domestic cutting tool market reached 46.4 billion yuan.

my country’s cemented carbide production is on the rise, while my country’s tungsten concentrate production has peaked and is now on a downward trend. In 2023, my country’s cemented carbide production reached 53,000 tons, while my country’s tungsten concentrate production was 114,870 tons, resulting in a ratio of cemented carbide production to tungsten concentrate production of 0.46, the highest in history. As a necessity for tungsten, cemented carbide production continues to increase, forming the strongest foundation for tungsten demand. The declining trend in tungsten concentrate production since 2020 will provide strong support for tungsten prices.

 Due to its high density and high melting point, tungsten metal is widely used in the defense and military industry. It can be used as a buffer material to withstand high temperatures and is commonly used in the manufacture of armor-piercing missiles in the defense industry. Tungsten is also used in various weapons, including large-caliber kinetic energy penetrator cores in conventional weapons, armor-piercing cores for machine gun shells, rod-shaped kinetic energy penetrator cores, fragmentation components for tactical missiles, warheads for bullets and aircraft shells, casings for shaped charges, cluster bombs, tungsten alloy warheads, and small-caliber tungsten alloy warheads. In addition, tungsten is used in the manufacture of external rotor bodies and counterweights for torpedoes, ships, tanks, and other weapons, as well as critical radiation shielding components in the nuclear industry.

Tungsten consumption in the military industry also exhibits a non-recyclable characteristic. As mentioned earlier, the tungsten industry has established a recycling system for recycled/scrap tungsten, but due to the special nature of the military industry, the tungsten resources used in this sector cannot be effectively recycled. A report published by Fastmarkets on February 26, 2025, stated: “Tungsten used in manufacturing can be recycled through advanced and mature tungsten scrap recycling technologies in European countries, but military tungsten cannot be recycled. If missiles are deployed, these materials will be completely consumed.”