Kickit, you are right. As I noted, if all you are doing is...

Kickit, you are right. As I noted, if all you are doing is buying, treating then selling a value added product (with some hedging) you will be fine making a margin. The problem here is compound IMO. The multiple issues are
1) when you buy raw materials now, then sell a finished product later, in a falling price environment, you might end up spending alot of time and money value adding in order to get back what you paid for the feedstock in the first place (commonly months between purchase and then sale of finished product), and
2) the plant has to be making a margin (positive) to begin with and that has to be enough not on just a C1 basis, but also to cover sustaining etc and administration costs.

In this case, the price of concentrate is usually a small discount to finished product (20-25%) the price of tungsten has fallen by more than this in the past year. So without hedging, you can be caught as the drop is equal to the margin.

The total costs - I don't want to rehash previous comments eloquently put by Treefeed months ago. It does not make money IMO.

Hence the compound problem.