Why I Keep Getting Calls From Brussels About a Valley in Gilgit-Baltistan

Three calls last month. One from a Belgian trader, one from a defence-adjacent procurement desk in Germany, and one from a Japanese trading house I won't name. All three asked the same question, more or less: can you actually deliver antimony, and how much, and when.

That tells you everything about where the market is.

Antimony crossed $39,000 a tonne earlier this year. Tungsten APT has been bid up steadily on the back of Chinese export controls. Molybdenum oxide is sitting in a band that makes marginal deposits suddenly look interesting. And the buyers I'm talking to are no longer asking about price first — they're asking about origin, traceability, and whether the material can clear a Western customs desk without a paper trail back to a sanctioned smelter.

So let me walk through what we're actually sitting on in Gilgit-Baltistan, concession by commodity, and where I think the realistic supply story is for the next three to seven years.

The belt itself — and why it's been ignored

Gilgit-Baltistan sits on the collision zone between the Indian and Eurasian plates. The Karakoram batholith, the Kohistan island arc, the Main Karakoram Thrust — these aren't obscure features. They're the same class of structures that host the porphyry copper-moly belts of Tibet and the antimony-tungsten provinces of southern China. Same continental collision, same age windows, similar fluid chemistry.

The reason this corridor stayed off the international map for so long isn't geology. It's access, security perception, and a licensing regime that — honestly — was a mess until the GB Mines and Minerals Department restructured it. Foreign direct investors used to walk away after one trip to Islamabad. That's changed in the last few years, though slower than anyone wants to admit.

We hold 16 concessions across the region. I'll talk about three commodity groups specifically.

Antimony. Our most advanced antimony showings sit in stibnite-quartz vein systems along shear zones in the Kohistan sequence. Surface grab samples on two of our concessions have returned between 12% and 47% Sb on individual vein samples — and yes, I know how that reads, so let me caveat properly: grab samples are not resources. They tell you the system is fertile. The work that matters now is channel sampling, trenching, and a maiden drill program to define tonnage at a mineable cut-off, probably somewhere around 2-3% Sb depending on metallurgy.

For context: China, Russia and Tajikistan supply roughly 78% of global mined antimony. The US has zero domestic primary production. The Perpetua project in Idaho is years from output. If you're a Western buyer reading this, the math is uncomfortable.

Tungsten. Scheelite-bearing skarns at the contact between the Karakoram granites and Paleozoic carbonates. Classic setting. We've identified scheelite under UV in float and outcrop on at least four of our blocks. Tungsten is harder to develop than antimony — concentration ratios are punishing, and the metallurgy varies wildly between scheelite and wolframite-dominated ore — but the strategic logic for a non-China source is the same or stronger. China controls roughly 80% of refined tungsten.

Molybdenum. This is the porphyry story. Molybdenite occurs as a by-product in the porphyry copper systems along the Kohistan arc, and there are standalone moly showings tied to the younger leucogranite intrusions. The grades aren't going to compete with Climax-type deposits in Colorado on their own. But as a credit to copper, in a system that's already going to be mined, the economics shift.

What a serious JV actually looks like from here

Here's the thing — I'm not interested in MOUs that sit in a drawer. I've signed two of those and learned the lesson. What works, and what I'm structuring new conversations around, looks roughly like this:

A staged earn-in. Phase one is exploration spend — typically $2-4 million over 18 to 24 months to take a concession from surface geochem and mapping through to a maiden drill program and a preliminary metallurgical workup. The partner earns a defined percentage on completion and verification. Phase two is feasibility-level work with a clear off-take right attached. Phase three is development capital.

That structure protects both sides. The partner isn't writing a development cheque on grab samples. We aren't handing over a concession for promises. And the off-take piece — which is what the Western buyers actually want — gets locked in before the heavy capital moves.

For pure off-take parties (the traders, the defence-supply intermediaries, the battery and magnet supply chains), the conversation is different. We can structure pre-payment finance against future concentrate, with the trader taking origin risk and we take delivery risk. It's not novel — it's how a lot of African copper concentrate moves — but it's new for Pakistan and it requires a buyer who's done it before elsewhere.

Logistics, because nobody asks until it's too late

Concentrate from GB moves by road to Karachi. It's roughly 1,800 km via the Karakoram Highway and the N-5. The KKH is paved, open year-round except for occasional winter closures over Khunjerab and slide events in monsoon. For buyers in China, there's the direct overland option through Khunjerab Pass into Xinjiang — and yes, I'm aware that for Western buyers that's exactly the routing they're trying to avoid, which is why Karachi-to-Jebel Ali or Karachi-to-Rotterdam is the relevant sea leg.

Export licensing for mineral concentrates is handled federally. Royalty rates on minerals in GB sit in a range that I'd describe as competitive with most African jurisdictions and meaningfully below Australia. I'll save the specifics for direct conversations because they vary by mineral and concession class.

What I'd tell a buyer in Munich or Tokyo today

Don't expect a tonne of antimony metal on a boat next quarter. That's not the honest answer. The honest answer is that the deposits are real, the geology is the right geology, the licensing is held and current, and a serious partner who comes in now at the exploration-and-earn-in stage is buying into a non-China critical minerals position at a cost basis that won't be available in three years.

If you want to talk specifics — which concessions, which commodities, what stage — my inbox is the right place to start. Bring a technical team. I'd rather have a hard conversation in month one than a polite one in month six.