Tungsten Mine Production: North Korea

## What this measures

Tungsten mine production in North Korea, in metric tons of tungsten content, one figure per year from the U.S. Geological Survey's Mineral Commodity Summaries.

## Why it matters

Tungsten makes cutting tools, wear parts and armour-piercing and high-temperature components. Where it is mined, and how concentrated that is, decides how exposed buyers are to one country's export policy, a mine outage or a price shock. The U.S. government lists it as a critical mineral.

## How to read it

Higher means more tungsten came out of North Korea's mines that year. Each point is a calendar year, dated December 31. The newest year is a USGS estimate and is usually revised in the next edition. Compare countries with the production share series, which divides by the world total.

## What it does not say

It is mine output, not refining or processing, which is often even more concentrated. USGS withholds some figures to protect company data ("W"), and those years are missing rather than zero. A dash in the source means zero or negligible output and is stored as zero.

## Source

U.S. Geological Survey, *Mineral Commodity Summaries* 2019 to 2026 (yearly; the 2026 edition is https://doi.org/10.3133/mcs2026). Each year's figure is taken from the newest edition that prints it, so later revisions replace earlier estimates; the newest year in each edition is a USGS estimate. Palanor read the figures from the world production and reserves table in each commodity chapter of the PDF editions (pubs.usgs.gov) and checked that the listed countries add up to the rounded world total. Licence: public domain. The report states: "Although this report is in the public domain, permission must be secured from the individual copyright owners to reproduce any copyrighted material contained within this report." The matching USGS data release (doi:10.5066/P1WKQ63T) is marked CC0 1.0 Universal. Updated each year when USGS publishes the new edition (late January).