Antimony from Gilgit-Baltistan: What We're Actually Sitting On

China restricted antimony exports in September 2024. Prices went from around $12,000/tonne to north of $39,000 inside twelve months. And suddenly my inbox — which used to be mostly jade buyers from Guangzhou — started filling up with procurement people from Rotterdam, Osaka and a defence prime in Arizona I won't name here.

So let me tell you what antimony actually looks like on the ground in Gilgit-Baltistan, because most of what I read online about Pakistani antimony is either wildly optimistic or written by people who've never held a piece of stibnite.

The geology, without the sales pitch

The antimony showings we're working across the Karakoram and Hindu Kush belts are almost all epithermal to mesothermal stibnite veins. Classic low-to-medium temperature hydrothermal systems, structurally controlled, often sitting along thrust faults and shear zones within the Kohistan-Ladakh arc suture and the Karakoram metamorphic complex. In plain English: stibnite (Sb2S3) in quartz veins, sometimes with minor arsenopyrite, pyrite, and occasionally a bit of scheelite where the tungsten story overlaps.

Grades vary a lot. That's the honest answer. From our channel sampling and grab samples across several concessions, we're seeing stibnite-dominant vein material running anywhere from 8% to 42% Sb, with the higher-grade shoots — the massive stibnite pods — occasionally pushing past 55% Sb on hand-picked lumpy ore. For context, Chinese producers were historically shipping concentrate at 50-60% Sb, and the global weighted average mine-head grade sits somewhere around 2-3% Sb once you factor in the big disseminated Russian and Tajik operations.

Our width is the limitation, not the grade. Vein widths run 0.4m to about 2.8m in the better-mapped sections. These aren't Xikuangshan-scale deposits. Nobody in Pakistan has a Xikuangshan. But structurally, we've got repeated vein sets along strike for hundreds of metres, and at least three of our concessions show en-echelon vein arrays that haven't been drill-tested at all.

That last part matters. Honestly, the biggest thing I got wrong when I started was assuming the surface exposure told the full story. It doesn't. Artisanal miners have been picking the outcropping high-grade for decades. What's untested is what sits below 40m depth, and that's where a serious JV partner with a couple of RC rigs would actually find out what we have.

Where GB antimony fits in the supply picture

Global mine production of antimony sits around 83,000 tonnes per year. China's still roughly 48% of that, Russia around 22%, Tajikistan close to 20%. Everyone else — Myanmar, Bolivia, Turkey, Australia, Pakistan — splits the rest. Pakistan's reported production is a rounding error in USGS numbers, maybe 100-200 tonnes annually through informal channels, mostly small operators trucking hand-sorted ore to Karachi and onward to China for processing.

That's the awkward part of the antimony Pakistan story right now. We mine it. We don't process it. There's no operational roaster or tri-sulfide plant in the country that I'd stand behind for export-grade metal or trioxide production. Concentrate goes out, value-added product doesn't come back.

Which is exactly the gap a serious off-take or JV structure can fill. A 200-tonne-per-day flotation and roasting circuit at pit-head, producing 99.65% Sb metal or Sb2O3 trioxide for flame retardant markets, changes the economics completely. The critical minerals antimony conversation in Brussels and Washington isn't really about raw mine supply — it's about non-Chinese processed supply. That's the actual bottleneck.

And here's the thing about defence procurement: US DLA stockpile targets for antimony were raised again in 2024, and the primer, tracer and armour-piercing applications simply don't have a substitute chemistry that works. Neither do the PET catalysts. Neither, really, does the flame retardant market at the price points textile buyers will accept.

What a JV partner actually needs to know

A few practical things, because I'd rather waste nobody's time.

Licensing sits under the Gilgit-Baltistan Mines and Minerals Department. Exploration licences are granted for three years, renewable, and mining leases run 30 years. GB has its own regulatory regime — it's not identical to Balochistan or KP, and the process is genuinely faster than what you'd deal with at Reko Diq, though the trade-off is smaller lease areas and more community-level negotiation.

Logistics: Karakoram Highway to Islamabad, then either Karachi port (roughly 1,600km from our Skardu-area holdings) or Gwadar. For antimony concentrate, containerised shipping works fine — we're not talking bulk carrier volumes. A 20-tonne payload trucked from Skardu to Karachi runs about $1,400-1,800 depending on season and whether the KKH has any landslide closures that week. Winter access to some of the higher-altitude showings shuts down November through March. Just is what it is.

Community and land: most of our concessions sit on state land with pastoral use rights held by local villages. We've negotiated access agreements on all sixteen holdings. I mention this because a JV partner walking in cold and trying to fast-track things without those relationships will find out very quickly why that doesn't work.

What I'd want from a serious partner is drilling — 3,000 to 5,000 metres of RC across the two most advanced stibnite prospects — plus metallurgical test work on bulk samples we can ship out for third-party assay. Everything before that is just talk, and I've had enough conversations at this point to know the difference between people doing due diligence and people writing white papers.

If you're sitting in Tokyo or Frankfurt trying to work out whether Pakistani antimony is real supply or a story, the honest answer is: the geology is real, the grades on outcrop are real, and what's missing is the drilling and the processing capacity. Both are solvable with capital and a partner who understands the difference between a mineral occurrence and a mine.

What's your timeline looking like on non-China antimony?