South Korea's Scramble for Mineral Security — and Why Pakistan Keeps Coming Up in Seoul

Seoul published a fresh critical minerals list in 2023. Thirty-three minerals. Ten flagged as strategic priorities — lithium, cobalt, nickel, tungsten, manganese, graphite and the rare earths that go into everything from Hyundai EV motors to Samsung SDI battery cathodes.

The target the Ministry of Trade set was blunt: cut dependence on any single country for those ten from around 80% down to 50% by 2030. That single country is China. Everyone knows it. Nobody in the briefing documents wants to say it too loudly.

And that's the opening.

Why Korea Can't Keep Buying the Way It Used To

Korea imports roughly 95% of its mineral raw materials. For a country running the world's third-largest battery industry and a top-five auto sector, that's an uncomfortable number. LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI and SK On together shipped over 500 GWh of battery capacity commitments into global supply agreements last year — and every gigawatt-hour of that needs cathode precursors, anode materials, and the tungsten carbide tooling that actually machines the cell casings.

Here's the thing most Western analysts miss. Korea's exposure isn't just to lithium and cobalt headlines. It's to the boring stuff. Tungsten for tooling and armour-piercing rounds (Hanwha's defence arm alone is a serious consumer). Antimony for flame retardants in EV battery packs and for the trimethyl antimony that goes into semiconductor doping. Molybdenum for the specialty steels Posco rolls for shipbuilding and pressure vessels.

China supplies over 80% of Korea's tungsten. Around 74% of its antimony. The 2023 export controls Beijing slapped on gallium, germanium and then graphite were the wake-up call. Korean procurement teams I've spoken with started actively scoping alternate origins within weeks.

Where Pakistan Actually Fits

Gilgit-Baltistan sits on the Karakoram batholith and the Kohistan island arc — a geological address that produces exactly the minerals Korea is short on. We're not talking about theoretical potential. We're talking about concessions that have been mapped, sampled, and in several cases historically worked at small scale.

On our 16 concessions we hold ground with:

• Antimony (stibnite) veins running strike lengths of several hundred metres, with rock chip samples in the 8–34% Sb range at surface. Krajgir and Chalt-area mineralisation.
• Tungsten — scheelite and wolframite — associated with the granitoid contacts. Historical Pakistan Mineral Development Corporation work flagged WO₃ grades that would interest any ferro-tungsten smelter.
• Molybdenum as porphyry-style mineralisation, co-occurring with copper. Grades that aren't Chilean but are perfectly economic at current Mo prices around $22/lb.
• Copper concentrate potential from the same porphyry systems, plus the vein-hosted stuff.

Look, I'll be honest — I used to pitch this as a copper story first because copper is the easy conversation. Then I sat across from a procurement director from a Korean trading house (won't name them) and realised he barely blinked at copper. What he wanted was tungsten and antimony origin diversification. Something he could put in a board paper that said "not China, not Russia, not Myanmar."

Pakistan ticks that box in a way very few jurisdictions do.

The Practical Side — Licensing, Logistics, and What Korean Partners Should Expect

Gilgit-Baltistan's mineral licensing sits with the GB Mines & Minerals Department, and since the SIFC (Special Investment Facilitation Council) was set up, foreign JV approvals have moved noticeably faster. Reko Diq's revival with Barrick was the signal event — it told everyone in the ministry that large foreign mining capital is welcome and protected at the federal level.

For Korean partners specifically, a few things worth knowing:

Export logistics run down the Karakoram Highway to Hasan Abdal, then either to Karachi or Port Qasim for containerised concentrate. It's roughly 1,900 km road-haul from Skardu to Karachi. Not cheap, but bulk concentrate economics work fine at current prices. For higher-value material (tungsten concentrate at 65% WO₃, antimony metal, mineral specimens), the freight is a rounding error.

Korea already has a decent commercial footprint in Pakistan through KOICA projects and the KOTRA office in Karachi. That matters. The diplomatic and commercial rails exist — you're not building relationships from zero the way a first-mover into, say, Central Asia would be.

Off-take structures we're seeing interest in: 5-year concentrate supply agreements with pre-payment against delivered tonnages, JV equity into specific concessions (typically 30–49% foreign, with operatorship negotiable), and toll-processing arrangements where the Korean partner takes concentrate to a third-country smelter.

What I'd Tell a Seoul-Based Buyer Right Now

Korea Mine Rehabilitation and Mineral Resources Corp (KOMIR, the old KORES) has been quietly rebuilding its overseas equity portfolio after the political reversal of the mid-2010s. Private-sector Korean traders — the majors and the mid-tier ones — are moving faster than the state entity, honestly. If you're at one of them and you're reading this, the practical next step isn't a memorandum. It's a site visit in the April–October window when GB is fully accessible.

Bring your geologist. Bring assays from your preferred lab. We'll show you the outcrops, the historical adits, the sample splits, and the licensing paperwork. What you don't want is another PowerPoint from another intermediary who's never been past Islamabad.

The minerals Korea needs to de-risk are sitting in ground we hold. The question is who moves first — because the Japanese trading houses and one Gulf sovereign vehicle are already asking the same questions.

Who's actually going to sign?