Narrative off. Here's the production map.

Global titanium sponge output in 2025 was roughly 370,000 tonnes. China produced 260,000 of that — about 70%. Japan made 55,000. Russia 25,000. Kazakhstan 19,000. Saudi Arabia 12,000. India barely registers at 250 tonnes. The United States produced zero commercial titanium sponge. Not low. Zero. The last large-scale domestic sponge plant — TIMET's Henderson, Nevada facility — closed in 2020, and the final remaining plant in Utah shut down in 2024.

That 86,000-tonne number is the whole story. China makes 70% of the world's sponge but less than 5% of it meets Western aerospace certification standards. Getting certified isn't a paperwork exercise — it's a 3-to-10-year qualification process involving metallurgical audits, fatigue testing, and OEM-specific approvals. Chinese sponge cannot meaningfully enter Western aerospace supply chains before 2028 at the earliest. Probably later.

Now look at utilization. Japan ran at 84% in 2024. OSAKA Titanium is spending ¥39 billion to expand from 40,000 to 50,000 tonnes — but that won't be fully online until March 2028. Saudi Arabia's ATTM joint venture ran at 96% utilization. That's a rounding error from maxed. Kazakhstan operated at 73%, the only node with meaningful slack. One country, one plant, one spare valve for all of Western aviation.

Meanwhile, demand is accelerating. Boeing's 737 line just hit 47 per month, up from 38 a year ago. The 787 Dreamliner is 15% titanium by weight. Boeing and Airbus carry a combined backlog of roughly 17,000 aircraft. At current delivery rates, that's over a decade of production — every frame requiring titanium forgings, every engine requiring titanium disks and blades.

The price tells the story. Chinese industrial sponge trades at $6.75/kg. Aerospace-grade Ti-6Al-4V bar — the alloy that goes into airframes and engine components — trades at $66/kg. That's a 10x premium, and it's widening. This isn't a commodity market. It's a certification bottleneck masquerading as a commodity market.

Here's the part nobody wants to discuss publicly: Airbus is still buying Russian titanium.

In November 2025, Canada quietly granted Airbus a sanctions waiver allowing continued imports traceable to VSMPO-AVISMA. Airbus had already eliminated Russian titanium from military programs but acknowledged "a short while" remained for civil aircraft. By most estimates, VSMPO still supplies roughly 20% of Airbus's needs — down from 50–60% pre-war, but not zero. Not close to zero.

This is the fault line. Political pressure to cut that last 20% is building. The EU Parliament has called for titanium sanctions repeatedly. Every drone that hits Berezniki makes the waiver harder to defend politically. And if that waiver gets pulled — or if VSMPO's production gets physically degraded enough that it can't fill even Airbus's reduced orders — that demand doesn't disappear. It slams directly into the 86,000-tonne qualified pool that is already running near capacity.

That counterfeit scandal in 2024 was the canary. Titanium with forged documentation made it into production aircraft — not prototype cells, not test benches, actual flying commercial jets. The FAA investigated. Spirit AeroSystems disclosed subpoenas. The industry spent months tracking the bad metal through the supply chain. What nobody said out loud: the fakes got in because the supply chain was already so tight that procurement teams were reaching further down the qualification ladder.

I've watched enough supply squeezes to know the sequence. First the premiums widen. Then the lead times stretch. Then somebody takes a shortcut. We're past stage three. The question is how much worse it gets from here.

The US has not produced commercial titanium sponge since its last remaining plant closed in 2024. It imports every gram of sponge feedstock, melts it domestically into ingot and billet, and calls itself a titanium supplier. It's like importing all your flour and calling yourself a wheat farmer. IperionX is scaling a powder operation to 1,400 tonnes per year at its Virginia campus — impressive for a startup, a rounding error against a market that needs tens of thousands of tonnes of aerospace-qualified sponge annually.