Certain mineral categories in the rare metals market are currently exhibiting an extremely abnormal price trajectory. Tungsten, gallium, germanium, and tantalum, four minerals, are being hit by severe supply shortages and explosive price surges, and the situation has reached a point where market participants are referring to them with alarm as the 'Terrible Four' rare metals.
The primary reason all of these continue to set new all-time highs is that, amid the deepening global conflicts, every one of them is a 'strategic material indispensable to cutting-edge military weapons.' In the current environment where military demand takes absolute priority, prices are effectively showing no ceiling.
The Military Applications of the 'Four' That Underpin Modern Warfare
With wars still ongoing, demand from the defence industries of various countries is intense, and this is the decisive backdrop that makes it appear as though prices can 'only keep rising.'
- Tungsten: With its extremely high melting point and hardness, it is being consumed in large quantities as a core component of missiles and as the penetrator in armour-piercing rounds (kinetic energy projectiles).
- Gallium: Its military value has surged as a core material for next-generation high-performance radar systems indispensable to air defence and interception systems (such as gallium nitride substrates), as well as for advanced electronic warfare systems.
- Germanium: An essential material for infrared night vision scopes that determine the outcome of night combat and reconnaissance, thermal detection sensors, and optical instruments for military reconnaissance satellites.
- Tantalum: An indispensable material for ultra-high-reliability capacitors used in missile guidance systems, where downtime is absolutely unacceptable under extreme conditions, and in military communications equipment.
An Abnormal Market With All-Time Highs Across the Board and Refining Bottlenecks
While military demand surges, the supply network is in a critical state. Current market prices are in an abnormally elevated range, as follows.
- Tungsten (APT): Reaching $3,000
- Gallium: Approaching the $3,000 per kilogram mark
- Germanium (metal): Trading at $7,000 to $8,000 per tonne
- Tantalum: Recording $260 per pound
On top of China's longstanding and increasingly stringent strategic export controls, the inflation and soaring logistics costs stemming from the deteriorating situation in the Middle East are hitting the market hard.
Among these, tungsten faces its greatest challenge in the form of a critical shortage of refining capacity in Western countries. Even if ore can be secured, the processing capacity for the intermediate stages of converting it into APT and tungsten powder is overwhelmingly insufficient within the Western supply chain, and this bottleneck is making the structural supply shortage all the more intractable.
The Crisis of 'Production Stoppages' Closing In on Civilian End Users
As military supply is given top priority and prices surge, it is the downstream civilian industries that bear the brunt. The intense supply shortage and cost increases have already exceeded the limits of what materials manufacturers can absorb through their own efforts.
The impact on end users is immeasurable, not only for materials manufacturers such as producers of cemented carbide tools that require tungsten, but also for the automotive industry beyond them, and further for the semiconductor and electronic components industry that makes extensive use of gallium, germanium, and tantalum. If the current supply constraints are prolonged, the prospect of component procurement running dry and forcing final product manufacturers to partially halt line operations or stop production entirely has become a very real possibility.
(Iruniverse YT, translated by Mehmet Gönültaş)
