Special: Analysis of China's Rare Earth & Magnet Exports 2024

Rare Earth 23 January 2025 #164

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Structure

Earlier than expected, but here it is.

This post is structured by:

• Rare earth compounds (rare earth carbonates, oxides, chlorides, fluorides)

• Rare earth ferrosilicon-alloys

• Rare earth metals

• Rare earth permanent magnets

Nota bene:

There is a bug in China’s trade data system. The sum of the rare earth 4-digit HS-code heading data is smaller than then the sum of underlying 6-digit HS-code data. So we expect a divergence of data of destination countries that is not time-lag related (gap between data upon shipment from China and data upon arrival at destination). The margin of error we estimate to be 2-3%.

Rare earth compounds

Rare earth compounds include exports of 49 different products of multiple different grades (=purities) each.

Something that rare earth hopefuls in the West like to ignore is, that you should be able to offer the full range of separated rare earths in different flavours and different grades, if you want to successfully participate in the market and substitute imports.

That means separation of every single element from lanthanum to lutetium plus yttrium (that expressly includes separation of neodymium and praseodymium).

Case in point: The U.S. is the single largest market for lutetium. And there is much more, unrelated to the much hyped “magnet materials.”

China’s rare earth compounds export to the world was worth US$424 mio in 2024. Keep that in mind when next time a rare earth junior muses about half a billion dollars sales of rare earth oxides per year.

“Go Big or Go Home” and NdPr-only does not work in rare earth. According to China’s import numbers Lynas shipped 3,261 t of NdPr to China in 2024, and MP Materials follow suit with 232 t, having no home market, no alternative markets either.

That is a potential death trap, if China gets angry (the Center of the Universe has been very emotional recently, making irrational, strategic mistakes).

We’ll dive deep into China’s rare earth imports in a separate post for paying subscribers. Watch this space.

Magnets

China’s export of rare earth permanent magnets was worth US$2.8 billion.

But again, don’t be deceived. We are talking about a dozens of different grades, about half of the output being NdFeB commodity magnets that you can buy on Alibaba.com. It is not exclusively the high performance NdFeB magnet that rare earth junior miners are lecturing investors about.

There is a defense relevance to this, but in NdFeB not remotely the scale that everyone likes to squadronise about. Heat is a mortal enemy of NdFeB magnets. Weapon delivery systems heat up more than any NdFeB magnet can take.

We are following 15 capacity-expansion and newly invested high performance NdFeB magnet projects in China, the last one scheduled for commissioning Q1 2026. The total capacity addition being 137,000 t/y over 2023, pushing China’s overall NdFeB magnet capacity beyond half a million metric tons per year.

According to a renowned magnet expert, the utilisation rate of NdFeB producers in China was just above 60% in 2024.

This does not look like a happy-end story.

Enough talk, here are the numbers.