Jon Emont

speaker

31 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2025 last heard Aug 2025

Jon Emont’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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WSJ What’s News · China Restricts Critical Minerals to Western Defense Companies · 4 Aug 2025 podcast

you

It's a really tricky time for them.

They rely on lots of these niche minerals, some of which are essentially almost only produced in China or the vast majority of them are produced in China.

So it's really difficult to source some of these minerals.

fairly obscure minerals and elements, things like germanium and gallium and samarium.

So we saw last year, December, China banned the export of a couple of, again, niche minerals that are needed for certain military functions.

And then in April this year, they heavily restricted the export of rare earth magnets, which are used in a lot of military functions, things like fighter jets and submarines and missiles.

And

It's just become much more difficult to source these things.

And as it's become much more difficult to source these things, the companies that do have stockpiles, the traders that do have existing stockpiles, they're, of course, getting mobbed by offers.

And what that inevitably does is it pushes up prices.

And for companies like Lockheed Martin and different military systems that they have are going to require a lot of different minerals like this, it's starting to bite.

So what we're seeing is that, let's say the April rare earth magnet and rare earth mineral restrictions that were introduced, trade negotiations since then have gotten those substantially eased.

So the United States and China trade negotiators have met repeatedly.

And what's happened now is that companies like Ford have reported that they've been able to access more magnets than they were before.

So they're

There's been some progress for civilian companies on the magnet front.

But when I've been speaking to folks who are sourcing rare earth minerals and magnets that have military applications, they haven't seen that easing.

And it's not surprising because China specifically said when it introduced these restrictions that the intention was for national security purposes.

They're clearly trying to make sure that their near monopoly on certain types of minerals means that they're not producing minerals that are going to be used in defense equipment that could be one day used against China.

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