Highlights
- Ather Energy CEO Tarun Mehta declares rare earth magnet supply shortage as 'sorted out' despite ongoing challenges.
- India's EV market remains critically dependent on Chinese rare earth magnet exports, revealing significant geopolitical vulnerabilities.
- Technical limitations persist in substituting heavy rare earth elements, presenting complex engineering and supply chain constraints.
At Bengaluru’s Ather (opens in a new tab) Community Day, CEO Tarun Mehta (opens in a new tab) declared the worst of India’s rare earth magnet shortage behind him. Launching a new e-scooter platform, he assured the crowd that restricted supplies are “sorted out for now.” In a country racing to electrify two-wheelers, his confidence matters. But beneath the optimism lie structural risks that can’t be wished away.
Solid Ground: What Checks Out
Mehta’s reference to recent disruptions is grounded in fact. China’s April 2025 export curbs hit neodymium, dysprosium, terbium, samarium, gadolinium, praseodymium, cerium, and finished magnets. Export data confirm: shipments of rare earth magnets plunged 74% year-on-year in May, snarling supply chains from EVs to wind turbines. India’s scooter OEMs were not spared. His push to diversify suppliers and reduce part counts in Ather’s new platform reflects real engineering adaptation to supply-chain stress.
Tarun Mehta: Liberated from rare earth supply chain shackles?
Between the Lines: The Leap Toward “Light” Rare Earths
Where things slip toward hopeful spin is in Mehta’s prescription: “move away from heavy rare earths to at least light rare earths.” While engineers can substitute to some extent—relying on NdPr instead of Dy/Tb for certain magnet grades—performance penalties are real. High-torque, high-temperature applications (think drive motors in hot Indian summers) still demand dysprosium or terbium doping. The claim that a pivot to light REEs solves the problem oversimplifies.
Selling Confidence, Masking Fragility
The Business Standard framing leans heavily on CEO Tarun Mehta’s optimism: the crisis is “sorted,” market share is rising, and diversification is supposedly on track. That’s part sales pitch, part survival strategy. Growth-stage CEOs often must project resilience as loudly as they market their products. But the underlying facts don’t change—India’s e-mobility boom is still lashed to Chinese magnet supply chains. No commercial-scale domestic separation facility is operational, and substitutes for heavy rare earth elements like dysprosium and terbium remain technically constrained. Presenting this moment as a solved problem risks blunting the urgency of India’s own industrial build-out.
The Real Signal Beneath the Headlines
For rare earth investors, the headline isn’t Ather’s trajectory toward 20% market share. It’s the stark reminder that Chinese export restrictions translate instantly into bottlenecks on Indian assembly lines. Mehta’s remarks confirm the direct exposure of India’s EV sector to Chinese supply maneuvers. With no alternative heavy rare earth refining capacity outside China, every neodymium-praseodymium magnet doped with Dy or Tb is a geopolitical choke point. India’s surging two-wheeler EV market—one of the largest in the world—can be slowed or shaped by decisions in Beijing. That’s the real takeaway for markets: technology adoption is now inseparable from rare earth geopolitics.
Citation: Business Standard, (opens in a new tab) Aug. 31, 2025.
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Tsusho Toyota, have worked out how to use La and Ce instead of Dy/Tb. also have signed an MOU with Pensana (to supplement the India operation) is this how the problem is sorted for now, by not being dependent on Chinese Raw materials