APT Up 900% In Twelve Months, And One Junior Has A Past-Producer

Issued on behalf of Western Star Resources Inc.

Eight months before DFARS 252.225-7052 prohibits Chinese tungsten from U.S. defense supply chains, capital is repricing the operators positioned to deliver — and a past-producing Nevada asset just filed with the Defense Industrial Base Consortium

USA News Group News Commentary

NEW YORK, May 20, 2026 /CNW/ -- Tungsten has stopped being an industrial curiosity. Rotterdam ammonium paratungstate — the benchmark intermediate in the tungsten supply chain — has gone from approximately US$300 per metric tonne unit in early 2025 to roughly US$2,650 per metric tonne unit by late March 2026, with one reported single-week move of US$400 per metric tonne unit between March 13 and March 20. By early May 2026, APT was changing hands at approximately US$3,185 per metric tonne unit — up roughly 350% year-to-date and approximately 900% over the trailing twelve months.[1]

That kind of price action is not a market anomaly. It is the visible expression of a binding supply-chain restructuring already underway.

China still controls roughly 80% of global tungsten supply. The U.S. Department of War's tungsten procurement cliff — codified in DFARS 252.225-7052, implementing 10 U.S.C. §4872, with statutory authority anchored in Section 844 of the FY2021 NDAA and meaningfully expanded by Section 854 of the FY2024 NDAA — becomes binding on January 1, 2027. The prohibition covers Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and North Korean tungsten across the full supply chain: tungsten metal powders, tungsten heavy alloys, samarium-cobalt magnets, neodymium-iron-boron magnets, and tantalum metals and alloys. Either new Western tungsten production capacity comes online inside the next several years, or the entire Western downstream tungsten market contracts. There is no third option.

Inside that setup, the operators positioned to actually deliver tungsten into the supply gap — not just trade against the thesis — are being repriced in real time. Western Star Resources Inc. (CSE: WSR) (OTC: WSRIF) owns the past-producing Rowland tungsten property in the Jarbidge mining district of Nevada — a U.S. asset with documented historical production that fits the geographic profile the U.S. Department of War is now actively underwriting.[2]

Over a roughly six-week stretch across April and May 2026, Western Star has executed a sequence — a Defense Industrial Base Consortium application, a twelve-month European investor relations mandate, and a CMETC-eligible flow-through financing — that reads less like a junior explorer's standing news flow and more like a deliberate effort to price into the reshoring trade through every channel available simultaneously.[1]

The DIBC Submission And The Past-Producing Rowland Asset

On May 1, 2026, Western Star submitted its application in response to a solicitation from the U.S. Defense Industrial Base Consortium (DIBC) to provide the United States a reliable supply of critical minerals, focusing on tungsten (WO₃).[3] The DIBC issued its February 2026 critical minerals request for project proposal under management by Advanced Technology International on behalf of the U.S. Department of War. The DoW has prioritized identification of supply chain alternatives for defense-critical minerals used in the production of aircraft, missiles, semiconductors, and other defense technologies.[3]

Western Star's flagship is the past-producing Rowland tungsten property approximately six miles southwest of Jarbidge, Nevada. Historical Rowland production, as reported in Western Star's news releases dated November 5, 2025 and April 9, 2026, consists of 4.5 tons of ore at 3.38% WO₃ shipped in 1943 and approximately 1,000 tons of ore at 0.5–1.0% WO₃ produced from 1954–56.[1] A LiDAR review across the property has identified more than 17 historical open pits, trenches, shafts, and adits, and the Company has indicated that extensive historical workings are expected to classify the project as previously disturbed — an attribute expected to streamline the permitting process.[1]

Mineralization at Rowland is hosted in skarn zones up to 100 feet wide, developed along intrusive contacts, with scheelite as the primary tungsten mineral alongside molybdenite, powellite, chalcopyrite, and pyrite within a garnet-epidote skarn system.[1]

Tungsten mineralization has been traced over 2 kilometres — the full length of the existing property package.[1] CEO and President Blake Morgan framed the strategic positioning directly in the May 1 release: "Western Star Resources is pleased to support DIBC initiatives focusing on strategic critical minerals. Our team will be traveling to Washington in May for meetings to discuss our past-producing tungsten asset. We believe this asset offers significant upside and look forward to demonstrating its potential as we approach our maiden drill program in 2026."[3]

The 2026 Spring Field Program: First Modern Work In Decades

On March 23, 2026, Western Star disclosed preparations to mobilize for the first modern exploration program at the past-producing Rowland Tungsten Property.[1] The 2026 spring work program is designed to advance the project toward drill targeting and includes rock sampling of all historically disturbed areas identified through LiDAR analysis to verify historical grades, define mineralized zones, and refine priority drill targets across the property. The QP for technical content on the Rowland Project is Jasper Mowatt, MAusIMM.

The structural advantage of working on a past-producing skarn asset with documented historical workings is twofold. First, the geological model is anchored to actual production history rather than only to grassroots prospecting data — meaning the technical risk profile of advancing the project toward a maiden drill program is materially different from a greenfield tungsten exploration scenario. Second, the previously disturbed classification expected to result from the LiDAR-identified historical workings is structurally favourable for the permitting timeline, particularly under the U.S. federal procurement environment that is now actively favouring near-term Western tungsten capacity.

Morgan's framing on March 23: "With the start of the spring field season coinciding with strong tungsten prices, we are ideally positioned to initiate the maiden exploration program at Rowland."[1] The Company has noted that tungsten prices have moved materially higher since the project was acquired — a tailwind that improves both the after-tax economics of the exploration program and the institutional appetite for funding tungsten exploration capital across the broader sector.

The European Channel: A €200,000 Plutus Mandate Through April 2027

Alongside the DIBC submission, Western Star announced on May 1, 2026 that it had entered into a twelve-month investor relations and marketing services agreement with Plutus Invest & Consulting GmbH of Bremen, Germany, dated April 28, 2026 and commencing May 1, 2026.[3] The Company has agreed to pay Plutus a fee of €200,000 payable on the commencement of services. The Plutus Agreement terminates April 30, 2027.[3] Services include consultation regarding advertorial marketing and public relations strategies, and designing and implementing an advertisement-based investor awareness campaign focused on the European investment market.[3]

The European channel is a deliberate structural piece of the architecture. Tungsten reshoring is a U.S. policy story, but the metal's industrial customer base spans Europe heavily — and the European procurement context around critical minerals supply security has moved aggressively in parallel with the U.S. policy track. The Plutus mandate positions Western Star for European market awareness during the back half of 2026 and through Q1 2027 — precisely the window during which the January 1, 2027 U.S. federal procurement rule takes effect and Western Star's maiden drill program will be generating its first modern technical results.[1]

CMETC: How The Canadian Tax Architecture Now Actively Subsidizes Western Tungsten

The financing component of Western Star's recent sequence is structurally distinct from a standard junior explorer non-brokered raise. CMETC eligibility attaches enhanced after-tax economics — a 30% non-refundable tax credit on top of the standard 100% Canadian Exploration Expense (CEE) deduction — to the flow-through subscription.

The timing of WSR's financing aligns with a specific policy change: tungsten was added to the CMETC's list of eligible critical minerals on November 4, 2025 (Budget Day 25), with the expansion enacted into law when Bill C-15 (the Budget 2025 Implementation Act, No. 1) received Royal Assent on March 26, 2026.[1] The expanded list — which also added bismuth, cesium, chromium, fluorspar, germanium, indium, manganese, molybdenum, niobium, tantalum, and tin — applies to flow-through share agreements entered into after Budget Day 25 and on or before March 31, 2027.[1] Western Star's flow-through agreement, entered into in the run-up to its May 1, 2026 announcement, sits squarely inside that window.

The combined effect is that Western Star Resources, a small-cap junior with a past-producing U.S. tungsten asset, can simultaneously pursue U.S. defense procurement engagement (through the DIBC), European retail and institutional investor outreach (through Plutus), and Canadian after-tax subscription economics (through the CMETC-eligible flow-through) — all in the same eight-month window before the procurement cliff takes force. Very few junior tungsten explorers globally are positioned across all three channels at once.

How Western Star Sits Inside The Broader Tungsten Industry

Tungsten Mining NL (ASX: TGN) is an Australian-listed pure-play tungsten developer with a portfolio of tungsten projects across Western Australia and South Australia, including the Mt Mulgine and Big Hill projects. The Company is positioned as one of the more advanced ASX-listed tungsten development comparables, with Mt Mulgine carrying a JORC Mineral Resource and active feasibility-level work underway. TGN offers an Australian-jurisdiction development-stage comparable for what advancing a tungsten project toward a production decision can look like in the current pricing and procurement environment.

Stelar Metals Limited (ASX: SLB) signed a binding earn-in agreement in May 2026 to acquire the Hill of Leaders Tungsten Project in Australia's Northern Territory — a 445-square-kilometre land position in the Tennant Creek Inlier that includes historical high-grade tungsten workings across more than two kilometres of strike, with rock chip samples grading up to 6.1% WO₃ and significant base-metal results.[10] Stelar has framed the geology as strongly analogous to TGN's nearby Hatches Creek deposit, which hosts a JORC inferred resource of 12 million tonnes at 0.17% WO₃ and 0.12% copper.[10] As a freshly capitalized junior pivoting directly into the tungsten-plus-critical-minerals investment thesis inside an established Australian mineral province, Stelar provides the early-stage exploration comparable for the kind of small-cap tungsten exposure that has actively re-rated as the broader Western reshoring trade and tungsten pricing environment have moved together over the past twelve months.

Critical Metals Corp. (NASDAQ: CRML) is a NASDAQ-listed critical-minerals development company advancing rare-earth and lithium assets including the Tanbreez rare earth project in Greenland. As one of the most directly comparable NASDAQ-listed critical-minerals juniors operating inside the broader Western strategic-minerals reshoring trade — combining a strategically located deposit, U.S. capital markets access, and explicit positioning into the supply-security investment thesis — Critical Metals Corp. helps frame how the public market is now valuing junior critical-minerals exposure inside the broader institutional re-rating. The comparable category is the broader strategic-metals juniors being repriced by the procurement-cliff-plus-tax-architecture combination that has reshaped 2026.

Ucore Rare Metals Inc. (TSXV: UCU) (OTCQX: UURAF) is advancing rare earth processing capacity inside the U.S. and Canada, with the Bokan Mountain rare earth project in Alaska and an active focus on building heavy rare earth separation capacity. Ucore provides one of the cleanest small-cap public comparables for the broader "Western critical-minerals processing" thesis that is now being aggressively repriced — and that frames the same procurement-driven institutional appetite that is repricing tungsten developers like Western Star. The processing-and-supply-security angle that Ucore operates inside is the same angle that the DIBC framework Western Star has now engaged with is built around.

Across all four comparables, the recurring pattern is unmistakable: critical-minerals capacity inside Western jurisdictions has been repriced aggressively across 2025 and 2026, with the developers and near-producers experiencing the cleanest re-ratings as the procurement framework, the tax architecture, and the commodity prices have all moved the same direction at the same time. Western Star sits at the early-development end of that spectrum with a past-producing U.S. tungsten asset, an active DIBC engagement, a European IR mandate, and a CMETC-eligible flow-through financing structure — all converging in the same eight-month window before the U.S. defense procurement cliff takes binding effect.

The Window Ahead For Western Star

Western Star's near-term catalyst window is well-defined and dense. The 2026 spring field season is in motion at Rowland, with rock sampling of historically disturbed areas underway and the maiden modern exploration program designed to advance the project toward drill targeting.[1] The DIBC application has been filed, with Washington meetings scheduled in May to discuss the past-producing tungsten asset.[3] The Plutus mandate is live through April 30, 2027 — covering exactly the window during which the January 1, 2027 procurement rule takes effect.[3] The CMETC-eligible flow-through financing structure sits inside the eligibility window through March 31, 2027.[1]

For investors who have read the procurement cliff, the tax architecture, the European procurement context, and the APT price trajectory across the past twelve months, Western Star Resources offers small-cap exposure to a past-producing U.S. tungsten asset operating with explicit U.S. defense procurement engagement, European investor outreach, and Canadian flow-through subscription economics — all in the same window. The macro is structural.

The procurement is now compulsory by federal regulation. The capital-markets architecture is now subsidized. The remaining question is execution of the maiden modern drill program at Rowland — and the next reads on that question arrive across the back half of 2026.

Read more on Wester Star on USA News Group' full write-up

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Article Sources

[1] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/05/13/3294215/0/en/Tungsten-Is-the-Critical-Mineral-Canada-Owns-and-One-Junior-Just-Financed-Its-Way-Into-the-Reshoring-Trade.html

[2] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/05/04/3286787/0/en/Western-Star-Files-Application-With-U-S-Defense-Industrial-Base-Consortium-as-Tungsten-Prices-Rip-and-the-West-Scrambles-for-Non-China-Supply.html

[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/western-star-resources-submits-application-114500091.html

[10] https://investingnews.com/stelar-metals-ltd-hill-of-leaders-tungsten-project-acquisition/

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