Titanium.
The furnace gets paid.

The United States imported every pound of titanium sponge it used last year, which had never happened before. Sponge is the raw metal every titanium part starts from, and the U.S. no longer has a working plant to make it. China makes about 70% of the world's supply, and America buys most of its own from Japan.

If you'd picked titanium stocks on that, you'd have bought the miners and the companies trying to make American sponge, and you'd have lost money. IperionX, the best-known U.S. startup trying to make titanium a new way, is down more than half this year. ATI, which melts titanium into the alloys that go into jet engines, is up almost 70%.

The difference comes down to where the hard part is. Titanium is strong, light, and doesn't corrode, which is why it ends up in jet engines, airframes, armor, and medical implants. Getting it there takes a long chain. Mined ore is chemically turned into porous sponge in an energy-hungry process. Melters combine sponge and scrap into ingots in specialized furnaces, and forgers and mills shape those into parts that have to be certified for flight. (Most titanium ore never becomes metal at all. It becomes the white pigment in paint.)

Demand at the top of that chain is rising. Boeing and Airbus are both pushing build rates higher, and some premium aerospace titanium now has lead times of close to two years. The sponge makers haven't felt much of it. The planemakers spent the past year working down stockpiles, and both Japanese suppliers saw profits drop sharply in the year to March.

Titanium stocks in 2027 pay at the furnace. The bottleneck isn't ore or sponge, it's qualified melting and forging capacity that aerospace customers trust. The list is grouped by where each company sits in that chain: the melters and forgers, the sponge maker, the new-process companies, the ore producers, and the two private giants.

These companies melt, forge and machine titanium into parts that have to be certified for flight. That certification is the moat, and it's why these are the strongest titanium stocks on the list.

ATI NYSE: ATI

ATI melts titanium and nickel alloys into the forms jet engine and airframe makers need, and aerospace and defense now make up about two-thirds of its sales. Its backlog hit a record $4.4 billion in June, and some of its premium titanium, the grade that goes into engine rotors, now has lead times of close to two years.

That's what pricing power looks like. ATI raised its full-year profit guidance in August and is bringing on a new titanium electron-beam furnace in Washington state, though qualifying it for aerospace has taken longer and cost more than planned.

Carpenter Technology NYSE: CRS

Carpenter Technology makes premium specialty alloys, mostly nickel and cobalt superalloys, plus titanium through its Dynamet business and metal powders for 3D printing. Its main alloy business hit a record 37.8% operating margin last quarter, a number you don't usually see from a metals company.

The company is guiding to $850–880 million of operating income next fiscal year and $1.2–1.3 billion by 2029. Its CEO died suddenly in July, and his predecessor came back to run it. The company reported record results a week later.

Howmet Aerospace NYSE: HWM

Howmet Aerospace buys titanium and nickel alloys and turns them into engine parts, structural forgings and aerospace fasteners. Titanium itself is only about a tenth of its revenue, but the parts it goes into carry some of the best margins in aerospace.

Revenue grew 24% last quarter at a 32% adjusted EBITDA margin. In April it closed a $1.8 billion purchase of CAM, another fastener maker. Howmet is the lowest-risk way to own aerospace titanium demand, because it gets paid for the part, not the metal.

Osaka Titanium TSE: 5726

Osaka Titanium is one of the two Japanese companies that supply most of the West's aerospace-grade sponge. The other, Toho Titanium, was absorbed into JX Advanced Metals and delisted in May, which leaves Osaka as the only listed pure play.

It's expanding its Amagasaki plant by 10,000 tonnes a year to about 50,000, at a cost of about ¥39 billion, due by March 2028. It sold about ¥22 billion of new stock in August to help pay for it. Profit fell 45% in the year to March as planemakers worked through inventory, then rebounded in the first quarter.

The Kroll process that makes sponge dates to the 1940s, and it's slow and power-hungry. These companies are trying to skip it.

IperionX NASDAQ: IPX

IperionX uses a patented process that it says makes titanium powder and parts with far less energy than the traditional route, much of it from scrap. Its plant in South Boston, Virginia, runs around the clock, and it's aiming for about 200 tonnes a year by the end of 2026 and roughly 1,400 tonnes in 2027.

The Pentagon has backed it with tens of millions of dollars in awards and a contract with a ceiling of up to $99 million. But revenue is still negligible, it lost $67 million last fiscal year, and the stock is down more than half this year, below the price of a July share sale. This is a binary bet: either its titanium gets qualified for defense and aerospace parts at scale, or the money runs out first.

6K Additive ASX: 6KA

6K Additive makes metal powders for 3D printing, including titanium, at plants in the U.S. It listed on the Australian exchange last December.

It's a smaller, more modest version of the same idea. It has a $23 million Defense Production Act award and just signed a $27 million U.S. Export-Import Bank loan. First-half revenue grew 73% to $13 million. 3D-printed titanium parts are still a sliver of the market, but they skip most of the forging and machining that makes titanium so expensive.

Iluka Resources ASX: ILU

Iluka Resources is the biggest Western producer of rutile and synthetic rutile, the high-grade feedstock for titanium metal and pigment. It's here because of what it's doing with that business: idling its synthetic rutile kilns, with mineral sands earnings down more than 80% in the first half.

Iluka's future is rare earths. Its Eneabba refinery is 60% built and due to start up in 2027. When the biggest Western titanium-feedstock company is shifting its money elsewhere, that tells you feedstock isn't where the titanium shortage is.

Sovereign Metals ASX: SVM

Sovereign Metals owns Kasiya in Malawi, one of the largest rutile deposits in the world, which also holds graphite. Its feasibility study in April put the cost of building the mine at $727 million.

In July, Rio Tinto, which owns about 18% of Sovereign, declined its option to become the mine's operator, citing a change in its own titanium strategy. That left Sovereign without its obvious partner. This is a developer that now has to find the money and the operator on its own.

TIMET (Private, Berkshire Hathaway)

TIMET is owned by Berkshire Hathaway's Precision Castparts and says it supplies nearly a fifth of the world's titanium. Its Henderson, Nevada, sponge plant, by far the biggest in the country, has sat idle since 2020. If Washington ever pays to restart domestic sponge, that plant is the obvious place to start.

VSMPO-AVISMA (Private, Russia)

VSMPO-AVISMA was once the world's biggest titanium supplier to Western aerospace. The U.S. put it on a trade blacklist in 2023, and Russian sponge output fell from 33,000 tonnes in 2024 to 25,000 in 2025. Every tonne Western planemakers stop buying from Russia has to come from someone on this list.

Titanium's real bottleneck in 2027 will be paperwork, not metal.

More sponge is coming. Osaka is adding 10,000 tonnes a year, Toho expanded its Japanese plants this year, and China has far more capacity than it uses. What can't be added quickly is qualified capacity, meaning a furnace, forge or new supplier that a jet engine maker has certified for flight. That process takes years of testing, and every change restarts part of it.

ATI is already living this. Its new furnace and its Mexico plant have both cost more than planned because of stricter qualification requirements. IperionX's biggest risk isn't its chemistry, it's getting its metal approved for parts that fly.

That's good news for the incumbent titanium stocks. As long as qualification is slow, the companies that already hold the certifications keep their pricing power, however much new sponge shows up. In titanium, the slowest step in the chain decides who gets paid.