HANOI: Some 80km north of Hanoi, in Thai Nguyen province, a massive open-cut mine tears into the landscape.
Ringed by dense, green hills, the vast, stepped crater is raw gray and brown. Along its sides, huge trucks creep along, while a murky pool lies stagnant at the bottom. This is Nui Phao, a mine that’s key to Vietnam’s foothold in the global critical minerals market.
It contains one of the world’s most important, and largest, non-China sources of tungsten, a metal essential for everything from chips and drilling equipment to armour-piercing weaponry.
With the value of the super-dense material soaring as countries ramp up defence budgets, it’s little wonder Nui Phao’s owner, Masan High-Tech Materials, a unit of Masan Group, is amping up its search for strategic investors.
“We’ve been talking to Japanese, Australian, European and American strategic” investors, Masan group deputy chief executive officer (CEO) Michael Hung Nguyen told Bloomberg News after a media tour of the mine last Friday.
“A lot of interest is coming from people who want to secure supply.”
With Masan looking to conduct a public listing at some point, “anybody with a strategic equity stake we would obviously be providing a progressive offtake agreement to sweeten the deal and make it long term.”
Masan High-Tech is currently preparing to transfer its shares from Vietnam’s Unlisted Public Co Market, or UpCom, to the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange and hopes that can be done as early as the first quarter of 2027, Masan Group CEO Danny Le told a shareholder meeting last Thursday.
China is the world’s main producer of tungsten and also holds the largest reserves. In February 2025, it tightened tungsten export controls to protect its domestic stash.
As the Trump administration intensifies efforts to reduce reliance on Chinese supply chains, the material has become one of the metals caught in the crossfire.
The 921 ha Nui Phao project, which is licensed until 2034, is one of the biggest producers of tungsten outside China, according to the mine’s operator.
With an estimated 3,000 tonnes in total, Vietnam was the world’s No 2 producer of tungsten behind Beijing last year, according to the US Geological Survey.
Although Masan is seeking to reduce its stake in Masan High-Tech and bring in a strategic partner, with tungsten central to advanced manufacturing and defence supply chains, any transaction will carry geopolitical significance.
Prospective investors will likely be evaluated not only on financial terms but also on their alignment with party chief and newly appointed President To Lam’s broader industrial policy objectives, including technology transfer, downstream processing and long-term value creation within the domestic economy.
“Critical minerals are a highly sensitive area in Vietnam, so bringing in a partner is in many ways also about choosing a long-term technological partner,” Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute said.
“The government is likely to look beyond the financial terms and ask whether a prospective investor fits Vietnam’s broader ambitions.”
Even though Masan is a private company, it will “still need to take those considerations into account,” he said.
Vietnam holds other significant critical minerals deposits too, notably bauxite and titanium, and it’s home to the world’s sixth-largest reserves of rare earths.
Masan High-Tech’s mine also produces fluorspar, an industrial mineral that’s used in lithium-ion batteries, bismuth, a metal that’s used in green energy and high-tech electronics, and copper.
Despite its abundant reserves, Vietnam has so far failed to capitalise well on its natural resources. Complex regulatory hurdles and opaque licensing processes have deterred investors, along with a corruption scandal involving one of the biggest Vietnamese rare earth firms.
A new Geology and Mineral Law in 2024 was aimed at improving access to more foreign investors. In December, the law was amended to restrict exports of unprocessed rare earth ores, signalling a shift toward higher-value domestic processing.
That fits with To Lam’s desire to move up the value chain as the country strives for 10% growth. — Bloomberg
