Ammonium paratungstate, the traded intermediate from which almost every tungsten product is made, was assessed at USD 2,600 to USD 3,200 per metric tonne unit on 1 July 2026 by the price reporting agency Fastmarkets. A year earlier the same assessment was USD 410. A metric tonne unit is tungsten’s standard trading unit, equal to 10 kilogrammes of contained tungsten trioxide.

Tungsten reaches a semiconductor as a gas. Tungsten hexafluoride, written as WF6, is a deposition gas used to lay down the tungsten filling the vertical connections in 3D NAND flash memory and the contact layers in advanced logic chips. It is made by reacting high-purity tungsten powder with fluorine. A fabrication plant, known as a fab, cannot substitute it casually, because the deposition recipe, the chamber and the qualification data are built around a specific supplier’s material.

China mined about 67,000 of the 85,000 tonnes of tungsten produced worldwide in 2025, roughly 79 per cent, and holds 2.5 million tonnes of the 4.7 million tonnes of global reserves, according to the United States Geological Survey. The same survey records China introducing export controls on selected tungsten items in February 2025, which it identifies as a driver of the sharp price increases through that year.

Japan is one of three centres of WF6 production, alongside South Korea and China, and its producers are Kanto Denka Kogyo and Central Glass, both listed in Tokyo. Fastmarkets puts the pair at roughly 20 to 30 per cent of global WF6 capacity and the South Korean electronics publication The Elec at about 25 per cent. Each estimate describes a share of one specialty gas rather than a share of the 85,000 tonnes of tungsten the world mined in 2025.

What has happened to the two producers needs reading carefully, because the primary evidence is thinner than the volume of coverage suggests. The Elec reported in April that both firms had notified South Korean chipmakers of supply disruption from the second half of 2026, and that inventories would carry customers only through May and June. Its reporting is attributed throughout to unnamed industry sources. Neither company has announced a production halt, and Kanto Denka Kogyo’s consolidated results statement of 15 May 2026 lists tungsten hexafluoride among its specialty gases and refers to instability in raw material procurement arising from geopolitical risk, without quantifying a tungsten impact.

One Japanese producer has made an on-record commitment. Japan New Metals, the Tokyo-listed tungsten powder producer, said it would limit order quantities to about 80 per cent of the previous financial year’s volumes from 1 April 2026. That is the firmest publicly confirmed evidence that Japanese tungsten supply has been rationed.

For a procurement team, qualification lead time is the number that governs exposure. Qualifying a new process gas at a fab normally takes more than 18 months, according to The Elec, again on unnamed industry sourcing, which also reports that firms are shortening or bypassing parts of that process because of the urgency. A buyer facing a 600 per cent input price rise can absorb it or pass it on within one quarter. A buyer who has to move to a different gas supplier is working to a schedule six times longer, because a fab will not accept unqualified material into a running process at any price.

The exposure is uneven among customers. The Elec reports that Samsung Electronics relies more heavily on Japanese WF6 than SK Hynix, which buys from several suppliers, and names the foundry DB HiTek among those affected. Korean domestic suppliers have told customers they plan to more than double WF6 prices.

The redistribution is visible in equity and spot markets. Peric Special Gases, the Chinese specialty gas producer, was the best-performing A-share in China in the first half of 2026, rising more than 730 per cent and taking its market value from 4 billion yuan to 14 billion yuan, according to Fastmarkets. Chinese WF6 spot pricing rose from around 300,000 yuan a tonne to 1.5 million yuan a tonne in early 2026, according to Ming Peng, general manager of the Chinese industrial gas producer Hubei Heyuan Gas.

Those numbers establish that Chinese producers are capturing pricing power and that investors expect them to capture volume. Whether global WF6 supply has concentrated further inside China is a question about market share, and no share data has been published for 2026. On the evidence available, export controls on a raw material used by Japanese gas producers have improved the commercial position of producers inside the country applying them.

The tungsten restrictions should be kept separate from the wider mineral dispute between Beijing and Tokyo, which they are often folded into. China has shipped no gallium, dysprosium, terbium or yttrium to Japan since December 2025, and none at all in June 2026, according to Chinese customs data reported by Reuters and cited by Australian mining publication Mining.com.au, in a freeze that followed Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comments on Taiwan. Tungsten is not among those four minerals. It sits under the separate February 2025 export control regime, which applies globally rather than to Japan alone.

Three developments would change the picture. A relaxation of Chinese tungsten export licensing would relieve the feedstock constraint, though it would not restore capacity already taken down. A disclosure from either Japanese company would settle whether the supply stop reported by The Elec is a permanent exit or a temporary curtailment. And qualification of Korean or Chinese WF6 at Japanese and Taiwanese fabs, on an 18-month clock started this year at the earliest, would show whether substitution is practically available.

Export controls are usually assessed where they touch the finished product. This one touches the chain four steps below, at a gas most people in the chip industry have never had to think about, and the recovery time is set by qualification schedules rather than by diplomacy.