WHY CHINA'S MINERALS GRIP WORRIES THE WEST

Between September 2024 and April 2025, China imposed strict export controls on minerals essential to semiconductors and green-energy technologies.

- BY HOWINDIALIVES.COM

Fresh curbs announced last month have only heightened month, it added more curbs. Such restrictions continue to unnerve the West, as they reveal China's singlehanded control over crucial parts of the supply chain of such minerals. There has been much talk of the need to diversify production and refining of key metals like lithium and rare-earths, but as this article explains, in the longer term, the bottleneck created by a few countries' dominance in production will ease only gradually.

TIME FRAMES

A KEY set of minerals has become critical to the economic success of the semiconductor industry and green technologies, and in battery manufacturing.

These energy minerals include copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and rare-earth elements. Rareearth metals are a group of 17 metals that are valuable when used with common metals like iron. Examples include samarium, gadolinium, and scandium.

First, consider demand and supply. While prices of all such critical minerals have gone through cycles, they haven't increased significantly in the long run. Price has been muted because the supply has risen sharply, often outstripping the rise in demand, in recent years.

Take copper. Its prices have risen by just 30% over the last 13 years. Rare earths prices have actually fallen in this period. The standout mineral has been lithium, whose price soared six times between 2020 and 2023, before falling again. But its net increase in 13 years is only 28%.

DIVERSIFIED DEMAND THE INTERNATIONAL