Antimony and Tungsten in Gilgit-Baltistan: What's Actually in the Ground

Last Tuesday I had three calls before lunch. One from a trading desk in Rotterdam, one from a defence-sector buyer in the EU, and one from a Chinese smelter group I've been talking to since 2022. All three asked the same thing — what can you actually deliver on antimony, and on what timeline.

So I want to put some structure around that answer. Because the questions are getting more technical, and the people asking them are no longer just curious. They're building supply plans for 2026 and 2027.

The antimony situation, plainly

China restricted antimony exports in September 2024. Prices went from around $13,000/t to north of $39,000/t inside ten months. Most Western buyers I speak to had no Plan B. Tajikistan, Turkey, a bit out of Bolivia and Australia — that's the shortlist, and none of it adds up to enough.

Gilgit-Baltistan sits on the same metallogenic belt that runs through Central Asia. The stibnite occurrences here aren't new to geologists — Pakistan's Geological Survey mapped antimony showings in Chilas, Astore and along the Indus suture decades ago. What's new is that anyone with capital actually cares.

Our concessions cover stibnite-quartz vein systems in two distinct structural settings. The first is shear-hosted, running through metasediments near the Main Mantle Thrust. Surface and shallow trench sampling on one of our blocks has returned grab samples ranging from 8.4% to 31% Sb, with channel averages in the 4–7% Sb range across vein widths of 0.6 to 1.8 metres. Honestly, the higher numbers are what they are — grab samples — but the channel data is what matters for resource work, and it's competitive with anything in Tajikistan.

The second setting is more interesting for scale. Disseminated stibnite within altered granitoid contacts of the Karakoram batholith, lower grade (typically 1.2–2.8% Sb) but over much wider zones. That's the kind of body you build a 500+ tpd operation around if the metallurgy behaves. Early bottle-roll work suggests it does — stibnite liberates cleanly at around 80 microns and floats to a 58–62% Sb concentrate, which is well inside smelter spec.

Tungsten — quieter market, harder problem

Tungsten doesn't make headlines like antimony, but if you're sourcing for defence or hard-metal tooling you already know the picture. APT prices have been grinding upward. China still controls roughly 80% of mined supply and almost all downstream processing. The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act named tungsten as strategic. The US Department of Defense has been quietly funding non-Chinese tungsten projects for three years now.

We have scheelite and wolframite occurrences across four of our 16 concessions. The most advanced — and the one I'd put in front of a serious JV partner tomorrow — is a skarn-hosted scheelite zone near the contact between the Karakoram batholith and Palaeozoic carbonates. UV lamp work over a 2.3 km strike shows continuous scheelite fluorescence in the exoskarn. Channel sampling across the main zone has returned 0.34% to 1.1% WO3 over widths of 3 to 11 metres.

For context: any tungsten project averaging above 0.25% WO3 is considered economically interesting. Above 0.5%, you're in the top quartile globally. We have intervals in both brackets, and we've barely drilled.

The wolframite occurrences are in pegmatite and greisen settings — same geological province where we're actively looking for lithium and tantalum. That's not a coincidence. The Karakoram batholith's late-stage fractionates are textbook for rare-metal pegmatites, and the fact that nobody has systematically explored them is more a function of Pakistan's political history than its geology.

What off-take actually looks like with us

Here's the thing — I keep getting asked for tonnage commitments before drilling is finished. I won't sign those. Not because we can't deliver, but because anyone who signs a binding off-take based on grab samples is either desperate or dishonest, and I'm trying not to be either.

What we will do, and what we're already doing with two parties:

• Bulk sampling programmes (50–500 tonne campaigns) with the buyer funding the sampling and getting first right on resulting concentrate. This gets material into your smelter for real metallurgical and assay verification within 6–9 months.
• Staged off-take tied to JORC-style resource milestones. You commit to volume bands as we prove tonnage. Pricing tied to LME / MB published benchmarks with grade-adjustment clauses.
• Equity-plus-off-take structures for partners who want to fund the drilling. We've had serious conversations on this from a Gulf sovereign vehicle and a Japanese trading house. Both made sense for different reasons.

Logistics — because this is the question that kills half the conversations. Concentrate moves by road from Gilgit to Karachi (roughly 1,650 km on the Karakoram Highway and N-5), or northbound through the Khunjerab Pass into Kashgar for buyers in western China. The northern route is seasonal — open roughly April through November depending on snow. Karachi is year-round and handles the EU, Gulf and Japanese flows. We've moved test parcels of jade and granite on both routes, so the freight forwarders and customs brokers are known quantities, not theoretical.

One thing I got wrong early on — I assumed Western buyers would want everything routed through Karachi for political reasons. Some do. But several EU defence-linked buyers have told me they're agnostic on routing as long as chain-of-custody documentation is clean and the material isn't co-mingled with Chinese-origin concentrate. That's solvable.

What I'd want you to do if you're serious

If you're a smelter, trader or end-user reading this and the numbers are inside your range — come and look. Site visits to Skardu and the concession blocks are arranged through our Islamabad office. Visa support, security clearance for the northern areas, helicopter access to the higher concessions if road conditions require it. We've hosted six delegations in the last fourteen months, four of them resulted in MoUs, two of those are now moving toward bulk sampling.

The geology has been here for forty million years. What's changed is that the rest of the world finally needs what's in it.