EQ Resources surges as investors clamour for military metal tungsten

Melbourne-based EQ had a market capitalisation of just $80 million in September last year. This has grown to $1.6 billion as of this week.

The rise is partly the result of a company revamp and recapitalisation but it’s also down to the record price highs of tungsten.

Tungsten is a critical mineral and like many other critical minerals, much of its supply comes China.

“Outside of the restricted suppliers, only 13% of global supply is currently able to be supplied out of what we classify as the western world,” EQ managing director Craig Bradshaw said during a webinar yesterday.

Tungsten’s use in military applications is particularly topical at the moment due to the escalating war in the Middle East.

Around 11% of global tungsten supply goes into defence uses and it can’t be substituted.

“Everyone in the world at the moment is significantly increasing their defence spend,” Bradshaw said.

“That’s putting pressure on the supply chain to actually feed tungsten into that application.”

The tungsten market has been in deficit for several years, with around half of global supply being consumed by China.

China accounts for around 85% of supply but has export restrictions on tungsten.

“That means any of the tungsten intermediaries can’t be exported because they can equally go into industrial technology, medical or military applications, so that forces the tungsten industry in China to go all the way down into end-use products, because they then can’t be utilised in in military applications,” Bradshaw said.

“That’s what’s caused the shortage, because what previously used to be tungsten units available as intermediaries is now not available, and since then, you’ve had an ongoing tightening of supply.”

Bradshaw said that was initially mitigated by large stockpiles of scrap that downstream producers were sitting on, but those stockpiles had largely been exhausted.

“And that’s why you’re seeing the tungsten price heading towards US$2000 as of last week,” he said.

“That’s why, when I talk about the fact that we could be producing five to six times more than what we currently do, we still wouldn’t touch the sides of what is the demand in the rest of the world at the moment.

“And quite simply, we’re not in a position to increase production by those levels.”

Growing production

EQ holds the Mt Carbine mine in North Queensland and the Barruecopardo mine in Spain, which produced a combined 167,805 metric tonne units of tungsten in the 2025 financial year.

“2025 was a difficult year for the company. We did have solvency challenges, we had liquidity challenges, we had governance challenges,” Bradshaw said.

“I joined as managing director on the 1^st of October with a clear mandate from the board to actually resolve those issues and remove those as impediments for investors and focus on getting the assets up the curve.”

Since then, EQ has renegotiated its debt and raised A$34 million, putting it in the strongest position it’s ever been in.

The company also has around 335 million in-the-money options on issue, which are continuing to strengthen its cash position.

While both of EQ’s operations have recently been impacted by wet weather, both were cashflow positive in the December quarter.

At Mt Carbine, EQ is focused on expanding its processing capacity and moving back into higher-grade ore following a geotechnical fault in the pit.

“At Barruecopardo, we’re looking at our assets as very much a hub-and-spoke development, not dissimilar to what you see in the Goldfields in Western Australia, whereby you have centralised milling and processing facilities, then taking material from others, but also from our own mining operations,” Bradshaw said.

EQ also has the opportunity to grow its reserves, with just 45% of the resource at Barruecopardo and 23% of the resource at Mt Carbine having been converted to reserves.

Hungry for tungsten

Bradshaw said all of EQ’s customers were “desperate” for more material.

“We’ve been down on where we’d like to have been production-wise over the last 12 months, but that is stepping up as our assets move from producing that 1680 tonnes a year to their potential, which we see between 2500 and 4000 tonnes over the next two years,” he said.

EQ is also well-placed to fund expansions, having received a letter of interest from the Export-Import Bank of the United States for up to US$34 million in debt funding for the Mt Carbine expansion.

Bradshaw said the facility had been held up by US government closures.

“We don’t sit back and wait for those things to come to fruition,” he said. “We’ve continued to look at commercial outcomes that would enable us to undertake the work that that money would fund.”

EQ is in talks with one of its customers around funding. “There’s desperate need in the world for tungsten from the market perspective, and we have offtakers that are willing to fund that style of investment,” Bradshaw said.