Highlights

• Baogang Group and Ordos Municipal Government collaborate to create a vertically integrated industrial ecosystem across energy, manufacturing, and advanced materials sectors
• China's strategy shifts from raw material production to comprehensive industrial chain orchestration, focusing on domestic value creation and technological innovation
• The Baogang-Ordos alliance represents a new model of state-led regional development targeting efficiency, technological advancement, and reduced global market dependencies

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On June 13, Baogang Group, China’s flagship rare earth and steel conglomerate, convened a high-level Supply-Demand Coordination and Industrial Chain Integration Conference with the Ordos Municipal Government (opens in a new tab)—marking a major step toward regionalized vertical integration of critical industries across Inner Mongolia.

Backed by the Inner Mongolia State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), the event—titled _“New Integration: Warm City and Baogang”_—aimed to coordinate upstream resources and downstream applications across energy, manufacturing, and advanced materials.  Rare Earth Exchanges (REEx) monitors such moves as part of the Two Rare Earth Base China strategy.

Baogang CEO Li Xiao emphasized the meeting as both a strategic handshake and a launchpad for deepening supply chain alignment across Ordos-based enterprises. Baogang pledged to provide “one-stop integrated Baogang solutions” across key sectors using its diversified product portfolio and service capabilities.

Key industrial domains included:

• New energy technologies
• Coal-chemical integration
• Advanced equipment manufacturing
• Rareearths and alloy materials

 Ordos’s resource abundance, paired with Baogang’s industrial heft, is being positioned as a regional model for China's national industrial chain strategy, particularly in extending and strengthening “key links” across critical sectors. Inner Mongolia SASAC Deputy Director Zhang Dong framed the collaboration as an execution vehicle for the region’s high-quality development goals—part of a broader campaign to find new orders, scale projects, and integrate science, technology, and policy across supply chains.

REEx Intelligence

The Baogang-Ordos alliance represents a quiet but consequential advancement of China's critical materials strategy: not just dominating production, but restructuring regional ecosystems to hardwire efficiency, loyalty, and resilience into its industrial base.

So what are some implications?

• Regional fusion is China’s new industrial model. Baogang is showing how state-led coordination at the municipal and provincial levels can eliminate supply-demand inefficiencies and create lock-in across sectors.
• “Chain Owner” logic is accelerating. China is deploying its major state-owned enterprises (SOEs), such as Baogang, as hubs of command and control over both inputs and applications. Rare earth producers are no longer raw material exporters—they are orchestrators of integrated production systems.
• Expect reduced export reliance. With vertically integrated ecosystems like this forming in Ordos and Baotou, a greater portion of China’s rare earth output will remain in the country, serving domestic clean energy, electric vehicle, and defense production, rather than global markets. The West and the nascent “ex-China” market need to accelerate.

Final Thoughts

China is no longer content with leading the global rare earth supply chain—it’s now building self-reinforcing industrial corridors to internalize value, reduce dependencies, and accelerate innovation, not to mention establish the conditions to prime the pump of demand, while maintaining more of the value chain domestically.