Tungsten West shares jumped as much as 10% to an intraday high of 49p after landing an eight-year supply deal that reads like a headline number designed to turn heads.
The company has signed a binding agreement to supply US-based Elmet Technologies with 1,000 tonnes of contained tungsten trioxide a year from its Hemerdon mine in Devon, England's answer to a critical-minerals stronghold.
At today's prices, that adds up to an indicative £1.4 billion over the eight-year term.
A word of caution before anyone gets carried away: the pricing is linked to European ammonium paratungstate prices, so that headline figure is indicative rather than locked in, and actual revenue will swing with commodity prices, exchange rates and exactly how much material gets delivered.
There's also room to grow further.
The deal lets Tungsten West ask Elmet to process an extra 500 tonnes a year, earmarked for UK government strategic needs and domestic industry, a nod to the growing appetite in Westminster for securing critical minerals closer to home.
This comes hot on the heels of the UK National Wealth Fund's pledge in August to invest up to £71 million in Tungsten West, a deal that also handed the government an exclusive window to negotiate rights over up to half of Hemerdon's annual output.
Elmet, for its part, is no small fry in this story either.
It's busy building out its own US tungsten supply chain, backed by a $450 million commitment from the US Department of War and a contract worth up to $2 billion to supply the US National Defence Stockpile.
Put together, it positions Hemerdon squarely as a Western alternative in a market increasingly nervous about where its critical minerals come from, feeding into defence, aerospace and advanced manufacturing on both sides of the Atlantic.
