The ITIA conference in Berlin sold out for the first time in its history. People were turned away at the door. Tungsten, once a niche industrial afterthought, is now the flavor of the year — and the room full of people who couldn’t get in proves it.
In the Season 4 premiere of Cliff’s Notes, Tungco CEO Cliff Nance sits down with Ioannis Kallinikos — head of tungsten trading at Traxys and one of the most globally experienced voices in the tungsten supply chain. Recorded live in Berlin, it’s a conversation that spans from how a Greek kid ended up trading tungsten concentrates in Singapore and Dubai, to the most important market dynamic the industry needs to watch right now.
■ Watch Season 4, Episode 1 on YouTube
Who Is Traxys — and Where Do They Fit in the Tungsten Chain?
Traxys is a specialist supply chain manager focused on critical minerals and battery metals, with a global book that sets them apart from regional players. In tungsten, their focus is the upstream end: concentrate. They are one of the largest movers of tungsten concentrate in the world, working directly with mines in difficult jurisdictions, providing financing and logistics, and delivering to the hydrometallurgical plants that turn concentrate into APT, BTO, and YTO.
Traxys has made a deliberate choice not to compete in the APT and oxide space — because those are their customers. The value they provide is in solving the upstream problem: getting material out of challenging mining regions, maintaining full chain of custody documentation, and delivering RMI-conformant product to refiners who require it. In the current environment, they have been flying tungsten concentrate across the world to keep supply chains moving.
Tungsten’s Day in the Sun — and the Warning Sign Inside It
Ioannis Kallinikos’s market read is one of the clearest in the episode: tungsten is having its moment. Prices have seen a spectacular increase. Balance sheets of companies in the tungsten space have grown significantly. New projects on both the mining and processing side are coming online. ITIA selling out for the first time is itself a signal.
But the opportunity comes with a challenge that the industry needs to take seriously: the growing delta between Chinese domestic tungsten prices and Western prices. Chinese producers, drawing on domestically priced raw material, can produce finished tools for mining and construction applications at a fraction of the cost of their Western counterparts. For non-critical applications — not defense, not advanced manufacturing, but general mining and construction tooling — that price gap is already redirecting demand toward Chinese producers.
Cliff echoes this from the recycling side: Tungco is already seeing scrap supply drop in certain categories, and when they ask suppliers why, the answer is not that a competitor picked up the business — it’s that the customer switched away from tungsten entirely, moving to high-speed steel or other alternatives. Once that substitution happens, Ioannis Kallinikos notes, it is very difficult to pull back.
His bottom line: for the whole tungsten ecosystem — Western miners, processors, recyclers, and end users — to coexist sustainably, the price gap between China and the West cannot remain as large as it is today. The industry
is having a good run. It cannot afford to fall asleep on it.
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