There is a quiet crisis unfolding in the supply chains that feed our industry, and it is one that every manufacturer, distributor, and serious shooter needs to understand. Over the past eighteen months, China has systematically tightened its grip on three raw materials that sit at the heart of modern ammunition and shotgun pellet production: tungsten, bismuth, and antimony. The price increases have been staggering. The strategic logic behind them is coldly deliberate. And the consequences for our trade are only beginning to be felt.
This is not a story about tariffs or trade war bluster. It is a story about a calculated long-term policy by Beijing to weaponise its dominance over critical minerals — targeting Western defence industries, semiconductor manufacturing, and the very tools used to extract the rare earth materials that will define the next century of technological power. Our industry sits squarely in the crossfire.
THE THREE METALS THAT ARE CHANGING EVERYTHING
Tungsten: The 200% Price Catastrophe
Tungsten has long been the premium choice for high-density shot — TSS (Tungsten Super Shot) in particular has transformed the waterfowl and turkey hunting market over the past decade. Its extraordinary density, roughly 1.7 times that of lead, allows smaller pellets to carry more energy downrange. That performance advantage is now coming at a price that threatens to put tungsten loads out of reach for many consumers.
At the start of 2025, tungsten concentrate was trading at around 143,000–144,500 yuan per tonne inside China. By December of that year, the same material had surged to 455,000–460,000 yuan per tonne — an increase of more than 216% in a single year. The processed forms used in ammunition manufacturing tell an equally alarming story. Ammonium paratungstate (APT), the key intermediate product from which tungsten metal is derived, rose from $335–345 per metric tonne unit at the start of 2025 to $1,050–1,115 by year’s end, an increase of around 218%. Ferro-tungsten, used in alloy applications, surged from $44–45 per kilogram to $134–142 per kilogram over the same period — more than a 210% increase.
These are not temporary market fluctuations. China controls approximately 81% of global primary tungsten supply, and Beijing has enacted a series of overlapping measures to reduce what flows out of the country. In February 2025, China introduced formal export controls requiring government licences for shipments of tungsten APT, tungsten oxide, tungsten carbide, and solid tungsten alloys. By March 2025, Chinese export data for several of these categories had fallen to zero. The export volume of tungsten APT fell by almost 70% in the first eleven months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. Only fifteen companies have been designated by Beijing as authorised tungsten exporters — a deliberate centralisation of control that creates an additional layer of uncertainty for Western buyers.
The United States has no domestic tungsten mining to speak of, relying entirely on imports and recycling. Developing alternative mine supply takes years, as industry analysts frequently note: building a tungsten mine or refinery typically requires a decade from start to stable operations. For ammunition manufacturers planning production runs in the near term, there is no quick fix.
Bismuth: The Metal Nobody Watched Until It Was Too Late
If tungsten’s price surge was alarming, bismuth’s trajectory in 2025 was nothing short of extraordinary. This relatively obscure metal — the preferred non-toxic alternative to lead for shotgun pellets in environmentally sensitive contexts — went from a quiet backwater of the metals market to a front-page strategic crisis in the space of a few weeks.
Bismuth had traded in a narrow band for nearly a decade. In January 2024, it sat at approximately $3.89 per pound in Rotterdam — cheap enough that procurement teams barely gave it a second glance. By December 2024, prices had edged up to around $5.30 per pound as early signs of Chinese supply tightening began to show. Then came 4 February 2025, when China’s Ministry of Commerce published export controls covering bismuth metal, bismuth alloys, and bismuth germanate. What followed was the largest price surge in the history of minor metals.
Within two weeks of the announcement, spot prices in Rotterdam doubled to approximately $12 per pound. By early March they had tripled to $18. European industrial buyers subsequently reported paying as high as $65 per pound for distress deliveries. American buyers faced even more extreme conditions, with prices reaching around $55 per pound — representing a near-700% increase from where the market had stood just months earlier. Chinese bismuth exports fell by more than 40% in the same period. The subsequent partial correction brought prices back to roughly $15–16 per pound by the end of 2025, but this “correction” represented a 167% premium over January 2025 levels. The old equilibrium is gone.
China controls over 80% of the world’s refined bismuth supply. The United States has not produced primary bismuth since 1997. The Defence Logistics Agency’s response — publishing a solicitation in August 2025 for 5.16 million pounds of bismuth to be stored at a munitions depot, with an absolute requirement that all production take place within the continental United States — tells you everything you need to know about how seriously the American defence establishment has taken this situation.
For our industry, the implications are direct. Bismuth shot is the go-to option for sensitive wetland environments, game farms, and wildfowl shooting where lead alternatives are mandated. It has carved out a meaningful and growing share of the premium shotshell market precisely because of its density and non-toxicity. Those pellets just became dramatically more expensive to produce.
Antimony: The Forgotten Hardener That Became a Crisis
Of the three metals discussed here, antimony’s story may be the most consequential for the broadest cross-section of our trade. While tungsten and bismuth serve specialist, premium markets, antimony is the workhorse hardener that makes conventional lead ammunition perform. It is alloyed with lead to produce the harder, more consistent pellets and bullets that have been the backbone of mass-market ammunition for well over a century. Its price trajectory over the past eighteen months has been extraordinary.
Antimony had been rising through 2024 as China’s domestic consumption grew and exports declined, but the critical turning point came on 14 August 2024, when Beijing announced formal export restrictions covering antimony ore, antimony metal, and antimony oxide. The controls took effect on 15 September 2024. The market reaction was immediate and extreme. Prior to the announcement, antimony was trading at around $22,000 per tonne in Rotterdam — itself already a significant increase from earlier in the year. By October 2024 the price had reached $32,433 per tonne. By April 2025 it stood at $57,778 per tonne. In December 2024, China went further and banned antimony exports to the United States entirely as part of a broader escalation of mineral trade restrictions. The entire price rally from mid-2024 to mid-2025 represented an increase of approximately 157%.
To put this in historical context, one metals analyst described it as the sharpest price rally ever recorded in the antimony market since price tracking began in the 1980s. China accounts for roughly 48% of global antimony production, and the combination of rising domestic military demand, tightening environmental regulations shutting domestic mines, and deliberate export control policy has created a supply shock from which the market has not recovered.
For ammunition manufacturers, the implications are sobering. The US Department of Defense uses antimony in over 200 types of ammunition. Chinese antimony exports to the United States dropped by 97% between the August 2024 announcement and the end of that year. The only domestic American antimony smelter with military-grade capability received an emergency $245 million sole-source contract from the Defence Logistics Agency in 2025 — but ramping up that capacity takes time our market does not have.
WHY CHINA IS DOING THIS
It would be tempting to frame Beijing’s mineral strategy as purely reactive — a tit-for-tat measure in response to Western semiconductor export controls or tariff escalation. The reality is more calculated and more concerning than that. China’s export controls on critical minerals serve three distinct strategic objectives, all of which intersect directly with our industry’s raw material base.
The first is defence leverage. Tungsten, bismuth, and antimony are all essential to modern munitions. Tungsten carbide tips drill through armour; antimony hardens lead projectiles and is embedded in armour-piercing rounds, night-vision optics, and missile components; bismuth is used in ammunition, radiation shielding, and advanced defence alloys. By restricting these materials, Beijing creates a tangible supply chain vulnerability in Western defence industrial capacity — including the civilian ammunition base that feeds into it. As one mining strategist was quoted as saying shortly after Beijing’s antimony restrictions were announced, everyone needs it for armaments now, and it is strategically preferable to retain it than to sell it.
The second objective is semiconductor dominance. Tungsten is critical to the semiconductor manufacturing process — it is used in the tungsten hexafluoride (WF₆) chemistry that deposits conductive layers in chips. Bismuth compounds appear in advanced semiconductor substrates and topological insulator materials. Antimony features in certain semiconductor applications. The global semiconductor industry was experiencing a demand recovery through 2025, with the annual growth rate for high-purity tungsten targets alone exceeding 15%. By controlling these feedstocks, China can directly influence Western chip manufacturing capacity and drive higher-value processing back onshore.
The third objective is the one that receives the least attention but is perhaps the most strategically significant. Tungsten carbide is the material of choice for the drill bits and cutting tools used to mine rare earth elements — the lanthanides and other critical minerals that underpin everything from electric vehicle motors to guided missile systems. China controls over 90% of global rare earth processing. If it can also constrain the supply of the tools used to mine competing rare earth deposits elsewhere in the world, it protects its dominant position across the entire critical minerals value chain. This is supply chain warfare conducted several moves ahead of where most Western policymakers are looking.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR OUR TRADE
The shooting and hunting industry has already begun to absorb these cost pressures. Warnings were circulating on importer and manufacturer websites as early as 2024 advising customers to stock up on bismuth, tungsten-composite, and TSS pellets ahead of major price increases. Those increases have now arrived. The handwriting was on the wall; the question now is how the industry adapts.
In practical terms, manufacturers are facing significantly higher input costs for any premium load using TSS or bismuth shot. Every bismuth waterfowl shell, every tungsten turkey load, every antimony-hardened lead core is being produced against a raw material cost base that has fundamentally shifted. Some of those costs will be passed on to the consumer; some will compress margins at the manufacturing and distribution level. None of the options are comfortable.
The longer-term structural response is already underway in the broader industrial world, even if it will take years to deliver meaningful relief to our specific supply chains. New tungsten mining projects are being developed in South Korea, Canada, the United States, and Australia. Antimony exploration is being fast-tracked in North America and Australia. Bismuth recovery from secondary sources is being reassessed as a strategic priority. Governments including the US Department of Defense and various European agencies are investing in domestic processing capacity and strategic stockpiling.
For those of us in the gun trade, the practical near-term advice is straightforward: expect sustained elevated pricing on any load using these three metals, plan procurement further ahead than you have historically needed to, and watch the geopolitical situation closely. China has form on this. It imposed rare earth export restrictions in 2010. It restricted gallium and germanium in 2023. Each time, the pattern is the same — announce controls framed around national security, watch prices surge and use the resulting leverage as a policy instrument.
Tungsten, bismuth, and antimony are simply the latest — and for our industry, the most directly relevant — chapters in that story.
Price data sourced from Fastmarkets, the Shanghai Metals Exchange, and the US Geological Survey. All figures correct at time of writing, April 2026.