Against the backdrop of tungsten carbide prices surging for nearly a year, the cutting tool industry is undergoing a dual transformation of price hikes and supply-side reshuffling. Leading enterprises are locking in profits by leveraging their inventory advantages and scale effects, while small and medium-sized enterprises are trapped in a "no raw materials to work with" predicament. The industry's pattern of the strong getting stronger is becoming increasingly evident.

As the "industrial mother machine" and "machine-making machine" of the manufacturing industry, the technological level of the machine tool industry is directly related to national security strategies and the core competitiveness of the manufacturing sector. China, as the world's largest producer and consumer of industrial mother machines, has maintained the top position in terms of industrial scale for 13 consecutive years. The next 10 years will be a critical period for the development of intelligent CNC machine tools, a typical piece of new-generation intelligent manufacturing equipment.

Recently, the prices of the main raw materials for hard alloys in China have been continuously rising, attracting widespread attention from the manufacturing industry. As a key material indispensable to the manufacturing sector, especially in the field of high-end equipment manufacturing, the price fluctuations of hard alloys affect the entire industrial chain. Since 2025, the prices of main raw materials for hard alloys such as tungsten concentrate and tungsten carbide powder have remained at a high level. Some varieties have seen a year-on-year increase of over 30%, reaching new highs in recent years. This round of price increase not only lasts for a long time but also features simultaneous efforts from both the supply and demand sides, which is fundamentally different from the previous cyclical fluctuations.

In recent years, as global mining has advanced towards deeper, more efficient and safer extraction, hard alloy tools, with their outstanding performance, have become a core technical support in modern mine drilling and excavation.

When we open the battery pack of an electric vehicle, traditional liquid batteries are facing dual bottlenecks of energy density and safety. At this moment, a silent but profound power transformation is taking place - all-solid-state batteries are moving from the laboratory to the production line, and from technical drawings to the real world.

The bonding phase and the hard phase of cemented carbides (typically referring to tungsten-cobalt type cemented carbides) are formed through specific powder metallurgy processes. Together, these two components determine the final performance of the material. In actual product design, by adjusting the ratio of the two phases, grain size, and sintering process, it is possible to precisely match different application requirements, ranging from precision machining to heavy-duty mining and other fields. This "hard phase + metal bonding phase" composite structure is the core reason why cemented carbides can simultaneously possess extremely high hardness and reasonable toughness.