The stop of production for protecting the price seems fails to achieve the desired results, for the rare earth prices remain sluggish. Under the pressure of the production, the three rare earth giant, including Baotou Steel Rare Earth, Minmetals and Chinalco Rare Earth, resume the production after nearly four months' production halts.

With the coming of the traditional rush season of rare earth consumption in March and April, the downstream application providers are expected to launch a new round of supplementing inventory, and there's a common wish of rises in rare earth prices among industries.

Enterprises gradually resume production

According to the reporters learning from Baotou Steel Rare Earth, the range of the corprorations resuming production covers the smelter directly under Baotou Steel Rare Earth, Huamei Corp., Hefa Corp.,Ganoderma company as well as the Quannan Jinhuan Corp. and Xinfeng Xinli smelting separation plant. Also, Minmetals Rare Earth and Chinalco resumed production after the Spring Festival as well.

"Generally speaking, there comes the traditional peak season of consumption of rare earth in March and April. In terms of corporations, several companies halted for a long time. Therefore, the resumption of production sounds reasonable to come along with the rush season at present," said an analyst, "however, from the current point of view, the downstream demand is not active."

Constrained by excess production capacity and sluggish downstreams demand, the price of rare earth in 2012 experienced a sharp decline in the stock market. For example, the offer of praseodymium nedymium oxide was 760.000 at the beginning of 2012, while it has dropped to 400.000 by the end of last year.

Under the pressure of price, Baotou Steel Rare Earth was the first to announce halts. Subsequently, the other two rare earth giant, Minmetals Rare Earth and Chinalco Corp. annnounced as well. Despite these giants,
some small and medium-sized enterprises have also joined in it, such as some small companies doing with rare earth smelting separation and magnetic materials.

                 

Looking forward to a bottom price of rare earth

However, the strategy of protecting the price by halting production did not reach a desirable result. For instance, the price of praseodymium nedymium oxide only realized a rise of 10% in a short term of the shutdown and sank down later. Now its price is just around 350.000.

As it is analized, there're two main reasons for its low effection. One is the diversity of the sales channels, which led to a gap between the price of formal-produced and illegal-produced rare earth. the other reason is that downstream demand is indeed the doldrums and the overseas supply began to increase.

According to media reports, the U.S. energy company Molycorp and Australia's Lynas Mining Corporation's Mount Weld mine were to start second mining. These two companies were expected to achieve an annual output of rare earth of about 40,000 tons, which will have a direct impact on the export of China's rare earth industry.

As far as we understand, there're still some small rare earth separating enterprises which do not resume production until now, and their downstream demand remains slowdown. Presently, with the coming of the rush season, whether the rare earth price will bottom up depends on the demands of the downstreams.


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China may only have 30 percent of the rare earths in the world, but they essentially have a monopoly--which the rest of the world has been tirelessly trying to work around. (To wit: Japan looks to Vietnam, the U.S. looks to California and Missouri, everyone looks under the sea.) In a slightly devilish business move, China sought to tighten their grip and raise prices by eliminating all sales to its major buyers, the U.S., Japan, and Europe, for one month.

During the sales freeze, China is also consolidating its various rare earths businesses and buying more rare earths. At the moment, about 60 percent of the country's rare earths supply is controlled by a single company, called Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare-Earth. That company is artificially created and listed as a state-owned company, as China has already forced some 35 local companies to either absorb into Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare-Earth, or fade away.

Analysts, according to the AP, think the plan will probably work; rare earths prices have been sliding downward lately, a trend China would certainly like to reverse, and it'll also give the country an opportunity to work on its locally-produced rare earths magnet industry--a much more profitable enterprise than simply selling raw materials. Of course, it's not going to do much to discourage, you know, every other country on the planet from trying to find an alternative to buying rare earths from China.

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Honda developed a new method, which is extracting rare earth metals from the waste batteries and other products for recycling and manufacturing new batteries again.

There is no doubt that electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles are cleaner cars. Compared to fuel vehicles, they emit lower, even zero exhaust gas.

Whether grid charging emits greenhouse gas depends on the source, but the battery itself is also a problem. In addition to the greenhouse gas, mining rare earth metals also produce pollution.

Recycling can reduce the demand for raw materials extraction, such as aluminum, whose recycling utilization rate of 100%. Compared with mining aluminum ore, recycling consumes less time and energy, and lowers greenhouse gas emissions at the same time.

Honda revealed they can extract more than 80% of the rare earth metal from those used batteries to make new electrodes of  new batteries. In this way, The demand for new materials will be reduced to below 20%.

Later, Honda plans to expand the recycling project to other rare earth sources, including old batteries from electric motorcycles as well as scrap metal recycle bins.

                  


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