CME Group has announced that it will launch Tungsten futures to meet rising demand for its metals complex, which recorded its highest-ever volume this year. Trading is set to start by early Q1 2027, pending all relevant regulatory reviews. With annual production of 85,000 to 95,000 metric tons, the global tungsten market is worth more than $20 billion at current spot prices. Tungsten has been identified as a critical mineral by the U.S., the E.U., Japan, India, and others, and while it has an active spot market, it has lacked a futures market. The contract will be financially settled based on the Fastmarkets assessment for tungsten APT (Ammonium Paratungstate), duty unpaid, CIF Rotterdam and Baltimore, and it will be listed by and subject to the rules of COMEX.
Jin Hennig, Managing Director and Global Head of Metals at CME Group, said tungsten sits at the intersection of advanced manufacturing, semiconductor technologies, and geopolitics, and that clients increasingly want to hedge their exposure and improve price transparency. He said the new contract will join CME's growing suite of critical minerals and energy transition metal products, giving clients more ways to manage risk as global supply chains restructure.
Industry participants also welcomed the launch. Quentin Lamarche, CEO of TechMet SCM, called the contract an important new tool for managing the commercial risks of physically trading and moving tungsten, adding that as critical mineral supply moves to the forefront for every major economy, transparent forward pricing will support reliable, long-term Western supply chains. Maarten Gassmann, Managing Director of Grondmet, said tungsten is essential to his manufacturing clients production but has been hard to budget for without a forward market, and that the contract fills that gap by giving them greater cost certainty in planning operations. Raju Daswani, CEO of Fastmarkets, said growing volatility and concentrated supply are raising the need for transparent, trusted price benchmarks, and that a contract based on Fastmarkets tungsten APT assessment is a significant step for the market, connecting physical-market price discovery with new ways to manage price risk.
CME's metals business set a new record in the first nine months of 2026, with 1.2 million contracts traded daily across precious and industrial metals, up 41% year-on-year.
