Tungsten West / TUN LN.
Huge move today +15% , now £630m mkt cap, been the best-performing stock in the Nutstuff portfolio over the last 18 months and +300% YTD. Why you may ask? And yes, its a UK stock!
Because it simply fits our Maslowian “needs rather than wants” framework and is now one of our top five holdings by portfolio weighting. Huge credit here to Pete Davies at Lansdowne, who originally brought the idea to us and made the introduction. By way of reminder: Tungsten is an exceptionally hard, heat-resistant metal essential to defence, aerospace, advanced manufacturing, electronics and next-generation energy, yet global supply remains overwhelmingly dominated by China. As export restrictions and geopolitical tensions increase, Western governments are being forced to prioritise secure access to critical raw materials. Hemerdon in Devon is one of the world’s largest tungsten resources, with around $300m of infrastructure already sunk into the site and the potential ultimately for a 40-year-plus operating life. Today’s £71m National Wealth Fund package therefore matters enormously because it substantially removes the financing risk that has dominated the equity story, while potentially making the UK Government a customer for up to 50% of Hemerdon’s tungsten production. I retain some scepticism about treating NWF backing itself as proof of wonderful economics. I was told earlier by someone else ( Tx Robin) who attended an NWF presentation last year, who reminded me that the CEO was refreshingly clear that part of the purpose of the £22bn fund was to finance infrastructure and strategically important projects where the anticipated returns might simply be too low for conventional infrastructure capital. Given the amount of sophisticated private capital already invested in Tungsten West, including Lansdowne, I don’t think that necessarily applies here, but it should sit in the back of my mind. In this case, however, the strategic importance is precisely part of the thesis. The really interesting question now becomes terminal value. The 2025 feasibility study produced an NPV7.5 of around $190m using tungsten at just $400/mtu, but by February the company calculated that prevailing tungsten and tin prices increased that NPV to around $1.7bn. Spot prices obviously shouldn’t simply be extrapolated for decades, but the sensitivity tells you something important about the embedded optionality. If Hemerdon successfully reaches nameplate production, establishes itself as a strategically important Western supplier and ultimately develops more of its enormous resource, what is a scarce, permitted, producing tungsten asset with potentially several decades of life actually worth? That number could look very different from the £600m market capitalisation investors are putting on Tungsten West today. We I guess originally bought the concept & thematic with financing risk; increasingly we may be owning the terminal value of a tangible scalable asset.
4August 25, 2026 148 1
