China bought itself two more months on Monday by extending until January 10 the pause in its radical controls on rare earth exports from October 2025. Reuters reportedbut the metal that is most pressing on buyers at the moment has never been covered by this one.
That metal is yttrium, which falls under a separate set of licensing rules imposed by Beijing in April 2025 on seven medium and heavy rare earths. When the hiatus began last November, the law firm Pillsbury Listed These April Rules among the measures still in force, which makes the extension a cheap gift: the October measures have since been frozen anyway. Shipping data shows what the April rules mean in practice. Bloomberg reported As of Tuesday, China’s yttrium oxide exports are about two-fifths of their average for 2023-2024, with almost none going to Japan this year.
The same report cites Argus Media prices of around $1.15 million per tonne in Europe compared to $9,144 in China, a 125-fold gap that barely existed before the restrictions.
Japan suffered the worst, with Chinese customs data showing the arrival of 4,000 kilograms of yttrium oxide in September compared to 51,000 a year earlier. AFP reported last month. The Financial Times reported on October 20 that Tokyo was on track to run out in months and called on Washington to lean on Beijing. A Japanese industry ministry official told AFP that global yttrium exports were at a standstill, causing a “supply and demand crisis.”
Yttrium also protects the turbine blades of gas-fired power plants and jet engines, according to Bloomberg, so the shortage extends well beyond chipmaking. The IEA warned in July that full implementation of China’s expanded controls, the ones just suspended, could endanger an estimated $6.5 trillion per year of downstream production outside of China.
Trump is expected to meet Xi on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Shenzhen, scheduled for November 18-19, and Washington has been complaining that rare earths are not arriving at the pace promised. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer recently used a video call with Deputy Prime Minister He Lifeng to call for “concrete actions” and with a former senior US official. told the National that some within the administration believe that China has “over-promised and under-delivered.”
Supply from outside China has been slow to arrive, with Lynas Rare Earths not expected to start producing yttrium at its Malaysian factory until 2028, Bloomberg reported, and USA Rare Earth said this week it had delivered its first samples of yttrium oxide, from a Colorado demonstration plant, to an unnamed customer for testing, Metal Tech News reported.
Chi Hin Ling, head of Asia metal pricing at Argus, told Bloomberg that no one has a clear idea of how much is in warehouses because global stocks of critical minerals are not transparent. “We still think the market is quite small,” he said. “Then, all of a sudden, someone will say, ‘Oh, wait, actually I have about 100 tons left in my warehouse – but I’ll sell it to you for $1 million a ton.'”
By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com
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