Almonty to Feed Los Santos Tailings to Sandvik's Tungsten Unit

Almonty Industries has signed a long-term tungsten concentrate supply agreement with Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten AG, a Sandvik Group subsidiary, covering a minimum of approximately 1,720 tonnes of contained WO3 from retreatment of the tailings stockpile at its Los Santos Mine in western Spain.

Almonty Industries has found a European buyer for material it already owns. The tungsten developer said it has entered a long-term concentrate supply agreement with Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten AG (WBH), a subsidiary of Sweden's Sandvik Group, covering the retreatment of the existing tailings stockpile at the Los Santos Mine in western Spain. The agreement covers a minimum of approximately 1,720 tonnes of contained WO3 — tungsten trioxide, the form in which tungsten content is conventionally measured and priced.

Shares in Almonty (ticker ALM) were quoted at 13.98 as of 15:22 GMT on 17 September 2026, up 3.79% from a previous close of 13.47, having traded between 13.83 and 14.25 on the day. That move outpaced a broadly firm tape: the S&P 500 tracker was up 0.95% at $761.25, the Nasdaq 100 tracker up 1.52% at $715.40 and the Dow 30 tracker up 0.51% at $517.84 at the same timestamp.

Why a tailings pile is the cheapest tungsten in Spain

Tailings are the finely ground residue left behind after ore has been processed. Because the rock has already been mined, hauled and crushed, retreating a stockpile skips the two most capital-hungry parts of a mining operation: stripping waste and blasting hard rock. What remains is a beneficiation problem — recovering the tungsten that the original flowsheet let slip — rather than a mine-building problem.

That matters for Los Santos specifically. The open-pit operation in western Spain has been part of Almonty's portfolio for years and has moved in and out of production with the tungsten price. A tailings retreatment campaign underwritten by a named offtaker is a materially different proposition from a conventional restart: the feed is on surface, the grade is known from historical processing records, and the volume is finite and therefore easy to schedule against a contract. It is the sort of project that can be sized to a customer's appetite rather than to a mine plan.

The lead detail is the minimum. A floor of roughly 1,720 t of contained WO3 tells the market the smallest quantity Almonty has committed to deliver, not the size of the prize. For a processor, a minimum tonnage is what makes a furnace schedule plannable; for a producer, it is what makes a bank or a board comfortable spending money on a concentrator circuit.

What Sandvik's downstream arm gets out of it

WBH sits inside Sandvik, one of the world's largest makers of cutting tools and rock-drilling equipment. Tungsten carbide is the material those products are built from, which makes Sandvik one of the few industrial groups that owns the whole chain from concentrate conversion through to the finished insert or drill bit. Securing concentrate from a European mine site shortens that chain and keeps it inside the same customs and regulatory perimeter as the plants that consume it.

That is the strategic core of the deal as reported by International Mining. Tungsten has spent years on Western critical-minerals lists precisely because supply is concentrated, and because China's export licensing regime for the metal and its intermediates has repeatedly forced Western converters to price political risk into their raw material books. A long-term agreement with a producer operating inside the European Union removes a licence, a shipping lane and a geopolitical variable from the equation.

Where this fits in Almonty's wider tungsten story

Almonty's investment case has been built around being one of the few non-Chinese tungsten suppliers of scale, with assets across Europe and Asia. Contracts like this one advance that case in a specific, unglamorous way: they convert an asset already sitting on a balance sheet into contracted volume with an industrial counterparty, rather than into spot exposure to a thinly traded metal.

For investors, the questions the announcement does not answer are the ones worth tracking:

• Pricing mechanism. Tungsten concentrate is typically sold against a published ammonium paratungstate reference with treatment terms negotiated on top. Whether this agreement is indexed, floored or fixed determines how much of the upside Almonty keeps.
• Delivery schedule. The minimum tonnage of contained WO3 says nothing about how many years it is spread across, and cash flow timing is what a finite tailings resource lives or dies on.
• Capital requirement. Retreatment still needs a processing circuit, a tailings deposition plan and permits from Spanish authorities.
• Recovery rate. The proportion of tungsten the plant can actually pull out of historical tailings is the single biggest swing factor in the economics.

The read-across for European critical minerals

There is a wider pattern here that goes beyond one Spanish pit. As Western governments have moved from writing critical-minerals strategies to financing them, the fastest-moving projects have not been greenfield mines with decade-long permitting paths. They have been brownfield restarts, waste reprocessing and expansions at sites where the ground has already been disturbed and the social licence already exists. A tailings stockpile with a Sandvik subsidiary at the other end of the contract is close to the archetype of that trade.

It also shows the direction of travel in offtake. Converters and toolmakers that once bought concentrate opportunistically on the spot market are increasingly willing to sign multi-year commitments to keep non-Chinese units flowing. For a producer of Almonty's size, that shift is worth more than any single tonnage figure: it changes who carries the price risk, and it makes the next financing conversation easier.

What to watch next is whether Almonty puts numbers around the retreatment capital cost and start-up timing, and whether the Los Santos template — surface feed, named buyer, defined minimum volume — gets repeated at other legacy tungsten sites in Europe.

Key facts

• Contracted minimum: Approximately 1,720 t of contained WO3
• Counterparty: Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten AG, a Sandvik Group subsidiary
• Asset: Tailings stockpile at the Los Santos Mine, western Spain
• ALM share price: 13.98, +3.79% as of 15:22 GMT, 17 Sep 2026

Frequently asked questions

What exactly did Almonty agree to supply?

Almonty Industries signed a long-term tungsten concentrate supply agreement with Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten AG covering material produced from retreating the existing tailings stockpile at its Los Santos Mine in western Spain. The agreement covers a minimum of approximately 1,720 tonnes of contained WO3, which is the floor volume rather than a cap on deliveries.

Who is Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten AG?

WBH is a tungsten processing business and a subsidiary of Sweden's Sandvik Group, one of the world's largest producers of cutting tools and rock-drilling equipment. Tungsten carbide is the core material in those products, so securing concentrate supply feeds directly into Sandvik's downstream manufacturing rather than being resold on the open market.

What are tailings and why retreat them?

Tailings are the fine residue left after ore has been crushed and processed. Retreating them recovers metal that the original plant failed to capture. Because the rock is already mined and on surface, the work avoids stripping, blasting and hauling, which are the most capital-intensive parts of mining. That typically makes retreatment cheaper and quicker to start than a conventional mine.

What is WO3 and why is tungsten measured that way?

WO3 is tungsten trioxide, the oxide form used as the industry's standard unit of account for tungsten content in concentrate. Contracts and price references are quoted on contained WO3 so that buyers and sellers can compare material of differing grades on a consistent basis, with treatment and refining terms negotiated separately.

How did Almonty shares react?

Almonty (ticker ALM) was quoted at 13.98 as of 15:22 GMT on 17 September 2026, a gain of 3.79% from the previous close of 13.47, with an intraday range of 13.83 to 14.25. That outpaced the major U.S. benchmarks at the same time, with the S&P 500 tracker up 0.95% and the Nasdaq 100 tracker up 1.52%.

Why does non-Chinese tungsten supply matter?

Tungsten appears on Western critical-minerals lists because global supply and processing capacity are heavily concentrated, and Chinese export licensing for the metal and its intermediates has repeatedly disrupted Western converters. An EU-based source supplying a European processor removes export permits and long shipping routes from the supply chain, which is why multi-year offtake commitments are becoming more common.

Sources

• Almonty Industries to supply Los Santos Mine retreated tailings to Sandvik’s Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten — International Mining

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