Rare Earths Concentrate Further at Every Single Stage
China mines 69% of rare earths, refines 91%, and makes 94% of permanent magnets, the same compounding pattern graphite shows, at even starker numbers.
Rare earths show the same compounding concentration pattern documented on graphite’s supply chain page, each processing step more concentrated than the last, here reaching the highest terminal figure of any material in this series.
Why this compounds rather than diffuses
Other producing countries, the United States, Myanmar, Australia, covered on this material’s geology page, mine real, meaningful tonnage, but overwhelmingly ship their ore or concentrate to China for the separation chemistry covered on the mining page, since comparable separation capacity largely does not exist elsewhere at commercial scale. The magnet-making step concentrates further still, since China also built the dominant downstream manufacturing base converting separated neodymium and dysprosium into finished NdFeB magnets.
Real, current efforts to build an alternative
Mountain Pass in California has restarted mining and is building domestic separation capacity, and several allied-country initiatives aim to build magnet manufacturing outside China, genuine, current responses to this concentration. These remain early-stage relative to the decades of accumulated Chinese capacity and expertise, and China’s 2023 and 2025 export restrictions on certain rare earth materials and magnet technology have already demonstrated this concentration as a real, exercised point of leverage, not merely a theoretical risk.
Sources: concentration figures at each stage reference this project’s own verified production data (USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025, IEA Critical Minerals Outlook); export restrictions are widely reported (Reuters, Bloomberg).