Almonty Signs Tungsten Offtake Agreement with Sandvik Group Subsidiary for Recycling of Existing Mine Tailings
DILLON, Mont. — Almonty Industries Inc. (“Almonty” or the “Company”) (Nasdaq: ALM) (Frankfurt: ALI1), a leading global producer of tungsten concentrate, today announced that it has entered into a long-term tungsten concentrate supply agreement with Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten AG (“WBH”), a subsidiary of the Sandvik Group, covering retreatment (“recycling”) of the Company’s existing tailings stockpile at the Los Santos Mine in western Spain. The agreement is intended to create an expedited tungsten supply solution with the ability to deliver concentrate in notably less time than the development of a traditional mine.
The agreement, which includes a conditional pay to play upfront US$3.0 million one-time payment for the offtake rights, is structured on a take-or-pay basis and is entered into in anticipation of the re-commencement of production at the Los Santos Mine, an open-pit scheelite skarn operation located approximately 50 kilometres south of Salamanca that has been in planned care and maintenance since February 2020. Material supplied under the agreement will be drawn from the retreatment of the mine’s existing tailings inventory.
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For Almonty, the agreement establishes a committed route to market for a restarted European Union asset before production resumes, together with customer capital to support reinstatement of the processing plant. For WBH, the agreement adds a documented non-Chinese, European Union origin feed source to a smelter that supplies the Western hard-metal and powder-metallurgy industries.
The agreement pairs two operations built on recovering tungsten from material that has already been mined once. At Los Santos, Almonty’s restart plan is centred on retreating the tailings inventory left behind by earlier processing rather than on new primary extraction. Through continuing tests and trials, the Company has materially improved WO₃ recovery from tailings retreatment.
WBH, which has been part of Sweden’s Sandvik Group since 2009, operates its refining and powder manufacturing complex at St. Martin im Sulmtal, Austria, where scheelite concentrate from its own Mittersill mine and concentrate purchased from around the world are processed alongside recycled secondary tungsten materials. The facility is the only integrated tungsten smelting plant outside of Asia and Russia, and the Sandvik Group’s business unit to which it belongs also operates a dedicated tungsten recycling capacity.
The agreement comes ahead of a significant change in United States defense procurement rules.
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