Tungsten West PLC

Uh, and that's good news basically for Cornwall, for the whole mining industry down there.

And obviously you've got Tungsten West now pretty well-funded.

The National Wealth Fund is throwing quite a lot of money at Cornwall.

Um, so I, I, in general, I think it's good news.

But obviously, you know, it seems there's going to be a lot of comparisons.

And I think on your site visit to Tungsten West, some of the people involved in this were on the site visit.

But there will be comparisons to Tungsten West.

Obviously, we act for Andrada Mining and they have a Tungsten mine also in Namibia, which is ought to be drawing comparisons.

There's less information about Berenberg, Berenberg, Berenberg.

That sounds exciting.

For those that aren't aware, it's Tungsten West down at Plimpton, so...

Good.

Well, it's all good stuff.

Not that lucky.

Uh, it's Tuesday, and Ollie's gone off on the, the big trip down to Tungsten West.

Everybody's going down there.

It's going to be a right jamboree.

That's ramping up now.

You've got the Hemiden mine, which is Tungsten West in the United Kingdom.

Yeah, we mentioned you've got EQ's two mines.

There's one in Queensland in Australia and there's one in Spain.

It's more of a processing margin.

Now...

One other point which is worth mentioning is I was chatting with EQ this last week and they mentioned that they see the payability of the concentrate from tungsten mine as falling because we mentioned that there's this new tungsten west mine, there's the Almonte-Sangdong mine, there's the Springer mine.

And there's the EQ mines themselves.

And that's common across all the sectors we're working with.

We just see again and again, and you've already talked about Tungsten West, examples of where brilliant things have started in the UK but it's been US or other money that's taken into scale and that's happened outside the UK.

So there's a money problem and there's also a pathway problem.

The pathway doesn't at the moment exist to really scale up things which could fill that gap for the UK and that's part of what we're trying to do with Mantle is set the conditions where we're able to cohere lots of different types of money into establishing the solutions to these problems for the UK.

That downstream base now faces a dilemma.

Western toolmakers are paying scarcity prices for feedstock, while end demand for tools doesn't necessarily justify these explosive tungsten prices.

Not every company can pass that through, and margins and free cash flow are feeling it.

Keep that in mind.

But it does need to be targeted.

Secondly, focus on price protection.

The Chinese domestic price for tungsten is half the Western price.

If Beijing decides to relax controls and flood the market, Western projects get stranded, as we've seen in rare earths more than once.

That's 26 million in sterling at 5.5p. And the transaction was significantly oversubscribed.

Use of proceeds will fund project development, G&A, project finance completion, environmental licensing... geotech work and working capital it also supplements an existing cash position of 15.5 million so bottom line this race supports progression towards a final investment decision on the borosso lithium project in 2027 so max how about you give us your thoughts on tungsten west

Okay, so Tungsten West has signed a very significant agreement with an eight-year supply and offtake deal with Elmet Technologies in the United States.

This covers 1,000 tons a year of contained tungsten oxide from the Hemadon mine in Devon.

Hemadon is one of the largest tungsten deposits in the world, and Elmet is a U.S. processor, so Tungsten West now has a long-term route into the American and British supply chains.

for a metal both governments class as critical and which China currently dominates.

There's also an option for Elmet to process further 500 tons a year at Tungsten West's request, specifically to support UK strategic requirements for the domestic industry.

The company puts an indicative nominal value of over 1.4 billion at prevailing prices.