Rare Earth Exchanges: Why America's Rare Earth Magnet Supply Chain Is Harder to Rebuild Than Its Mines

Highlights

• China produced ~94% of the world's sintered rare-earth permanent magnets in 2024, giving it an entrenched industrial ecosystem advantage over Western rivals.
• A functional magnet supply chain requires seven stages—mining through customer qualification—and a bottleneck at any single stage can halt an entire factory.
• Western investors should measure qualified, independently secured magnet output rather than announced production capacity or tonnes of mined rare earths.
• Heavy rare earths like dysprosium and terbium must be tracked separately from NdPr, as they introduce distinct supply-chain vulnerabilities for high-temperature applications.
• Companies such as MP Materials, Lynas, and Vacuumschmelze address different links in the chain, but no single Western producer yet spans all seven stages commercially.