Highlights
- CREG’s 2025 Annual Financial Work Conference signals a strategic shift towards sophisticated, risk-conscious financial management.
- Finance is now viewed as strategic infrastructure, focusing on supporting strategy, enabling decision-making, and creating value.
- The conference highlights China’s approach to upgrading institutional machinery in the rare earth sector through advanced financial governance.
Earlier in May China Rare Earth Group (CREG) convened its 2025 Annual Financial Work Conference (opens in a new tab), signaling a decisive shift toward more sophisticated, risk-conscious, and value-driven financial management to support the company’s ambition of becoming a world-class, innovation-driven rare earth industrial group. The conference took place against the backdrop of major national policy priorities, including the 20th Party Congress and Central Economic Work Conference.
Chairman Liu Leiyun and Chief Accountant Guo Liangjin presided over the meeting, which brought together financial leadership across CREG’s subsidiaries and affiliates. The gathering marks a strategic recalibration of financial functions within China’s most powerful rare earth conglomerate, integrating fiscal discipline with national industrial policy and geopolitical competitiveness, as reported by Rare Earth Exchanges (REEx).
Financial Management as Strategic Infrastructure
CREG’s leadership emphasized that finance is no longer just about books and budgets—it’s about strategy, risk, and technological transformation. Over the past three years, the Group’s financial system has undergone what was described as a “full-spectrum transformation,” aligning closely with directives from the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC). The current focus, according to Chairman Liu, is to consolidate this momentum and deepen the shift from reactive accounting to proactive, strategic financial governance.
The conference reaffirmed finance’s core role in five areas:
- Supporting strategy
- Enabling executive decision-making
- Serving business operations
- Creating value
- Controlling and preventing risk
These goals reflect broader trends among Chinese state-owned industrial giants, where financial governance is now viewed as a critical tool for executing national policy, especially in sensitive sectors such as rare earths.
Key Themes and Priorities for 2025
According to official statements, the financial work in 2025 will concentrate on the following strategic priorities:
| Five Tough Battles | A set of organizational mandates derived from the Group’s 2025 Annual Work Plan, intended to align financial operations with production scaling, R&D acceleration, and supply chain integration |
| Digital and Smart Finance | Emphasizing the need for digitized, real-time financial systems to support CREG’s expanding international footprint and increasingly complex business ecosystem. This aligns with China’s broader push for (smart-digital integration) in state-owned enterprise management |
| Risk Controls and Fiscal Discipline | Strengthening the internal firewall against financial irregularities and market volatility—especially crucial given the international trade frictions, currency fluctuations, and price instability in global rare earth markets. Integrated Planning and Cost Control, |
| Integrated Cost Control | Coordinating annual budgeting, cost accounting, and capital allocation to improve bottom-line efficiency while supporting upstream mining, midstream processing, and downstream innovation initiatives. |
Talent and Accountability
A notable feature of the event was that CFOs and financial managers from CREG’s directly managed subsidiaries delivered in-depth presentations on performance, challenges, and proposed solutions. These reports focused on core issues, including annual financial settlements, budget compilation, cost control, and the rollout of financial information systems.
The conference also called for greater Party-led ideological alignment within finance teams, reinforcing the Communist Party’s emphasis on embedding political discipline within operational units. Managers were urged to internalize their “responsibility and mission” in serving the national strategy through financial stewardship.
REEx Commentary
CREG’s financial transformation underscores a larger trend: China is not just dominating the global rare earth market through production—it’s upgrading the institutional machinery behind it. As the Group scales globally, so too must its internal controls, resource allocation models, and risk mitigation systems.
For international investors and suppliers, this is particularly important. Sophisticated financial governance within CREG enhances its ability to outcompete global firms in terms of cost, speed, and capital deployment. More importantly, it suggests that Beijing’s rare earth strategy is not only resource-rich, but structurally reinforced—layer by layer, ledger by ledger.
Source: China Rare Earth Group Official Statement | May 20, 2025 (opens in a new tab)
See Rare Earth Exchanges and the Forum (opens in a new tab).
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