Antimony, Tungsten and Moly from Gilgit-Baltistan: A Briefing for Western Buyers

Antimony closed at over USD 39,000/t on the Rotterdam market last quarter. Five years ago it was sitting around USD 6,000. That single price chart explains most of the emails landing in my inbox from Frankfurt, Tokyo and Pittsburgh.

And honestly, the calls aren't really about price. They're about origin. Where the tonnes come from has become the whole conversation — because Beijing's export licensing regime on antimony, tungsten, gallium and germanium has rewritten how Western defence primes and battery makers think about feedstock.

So here's a straight briefing on what we've got in Gilgit-Baltistan, what the rocks actually say, and what a serious off-take or JV conversation with GBX Resources looks like.

The geology, without the marketing gloss

GB sits at the collision of three of the planet's most mineralised orogenic systems — the Karakoram, the Hindu Kush and the western Himalaya. The Karakoram metallogenic belt runs roughly east-west across our concessions, and it's the same fertile granitoid system that hosts the major W-Mo-Cu deposits described across the trans-Himalaya in Tibet and Ladakh. Same suture, same age windows (mostly Cretaceous to Miocene intrusives), same ore-forming fluids. Just a different political boundary.

On antimony, our work is concentrated on stibnite-quartz vein systems in the Chilas–Darel corridor and a second cluster further north. Surface chip sampling on the more developed showings has returned Sb grades in the 12–28% range, with one channel cut over 1.4 m running 41.6% Sb. That's high-grade by any standard — for context, Hillgrove in Australia mines at roughly 4–5% Sb. We're not claiming a defined resource yet (no JORC or NI 43-101 statement — I won't pretend otherwise), but the surface expression is genuinely unusual.

Tungsten shows up as scheelite and wolframite, mostly in skarn contacts and greisen zones near granitoid margins. Our Skardu-area concession has scheelite-bearing skarn over a strike length we've walked at roughly 800 m, with grab samples between 0.4% and 1.9% WO₃. The molybdenum is mostly porphyry-style — disseminated molybdenite associated with quartz-sericite alteration in two of our copper concessions. Mo grades are modest in absolute terms (0.02–0.08%) but they're a credit, not the headline.

Copper sits alongside all of it. Which matters, because the economics of a porphyry Cu-Mo system are different from a standalone moly play.

Why this matters to a buyer in Stuttgart or Osaka

Look, I'll be blunt about the supply picture. China processes around 48% of global antimony and controls a much larger share of the refined tungsten market. Tajikistan and Russia round out most of the rest of mined antimony. There are very few jurisdictions where a Western or Japanese buyer can sign a multi-year off-take for stibnite concentrate and not have it touch a sanctioned or restricted supply chain.

Pakistan is one of them. Gilgit-Baltistan specifically operates under a provincial mining regime — the GB Minerals Concession Rules — which is separate from the federal framework that governs Balochistan. Licences are issued by the GB Department of Mineral Resources in Gilgit. Exploration licences run three years, renewable, and convert to a mining lease on a defined resource. Royalty rates are in the 2–5% range depending on commodity. Export of unprocessed concentrate is permitted under SBP and FBR regulations, and we route through Karachi Port or, for China-bound consignments, overland via the Khunjerab Pass and the Karakoram Highway into Kashgar.

I used to think the KKH route would always be the obvious play for our Chinese off-takers. It is for jade and granite. But for sulphide concentrates the seasonality (Khunjerab is closed roughly four months a year) means most serious buyers actually prefer Karachi-bound logistics for predictability. Got that wrong at first.

What a credible JV conversation looks like

Here's the thing — we get a lot of inbound that isn't serious. So let me say what is.

A real conversation usually starts with one of three structures:

• Exploration earn-in. Partner funds a defined work programme (typically USD 2–6M over 24–36 months covering trenching, diamond drilling, and a maiden resource estimate to JORC or NI 43-101) in return for an equity stake in the concession SPV. We retain operatorship on the ground, partner controls technical sign-off.
• Off-take with prepayment. For concessions already at small-scale production (we have artisanal-grade stibnite moving now), partners prepay against tonnage at a discount to LME or Rotterdam reference pricing. Typical terms we've discussed: 18–36 month commitments, 200–1,000 tonnes per month of concentrate at 45%+ Sb after gravity concentration.
• Full JV at concession level. A 50/50 or 60/40 vehicle holding the licence, with the partner taking marketing rights and GBX handling permits, community, and operations.

What I won't do is sell raw concession data over email to anyone who asks. NDAs first, then a data room, then a site visit. The site visits matter — Gilgit is a 50-minute flight from Islamabad (weather permitting) or a 14-hour drive on the KKH. Buyers who haven't stood on the outcrop tend to misprice both the opportunity and the operational reality.

A note on the defence and EV angle

Antimony trioxide goes into flame retardants, lead-acid batteries and — the part nobody likes to talk about openly — armour-piercing ammunition and night-vision optics. Tungsten goes into kinetic penetrators, cutting tools and increasingly into anode chemistries being trialled for fast-charge EV cells. Molybdenum is a steel alloying staple but also matters for CIGS thin-film solar and for the high-temperature alloys in jet engines.

Every one of those end uses is now on someone's national-security list. The US Defense Production Act Title III awards, the EU Critical Raw Materials Act, Japan's JOGMEC stockpiling programme — they're all pointing at the same shopping list. And that shopping list increasingly excludes the dominant supplier.

Which is why a stibnite vein in a valley north of Chilas is suddenly a strategic asset, not a curiosity.

If you're sourcing for a Tier 1 supply chain and want to talk specifics — grades, tonnages, licence status, lab reports — write to me directly through gbxresources.org. Bring your technical team. Bring questions about what we haven't done yet, not just what we have. That's usually the more useful conversation anyway.