A well written article by friend of Strawman, Alan Kohler outlining some interesting analogies to past historical events and actions between US and the "iron curtain" countries. Love the Sputnik comparison!!
Trump's rare earths deal to counter China was a badly needed 'Sputnik moment'
By Alan Kohler
China is both communist and working passably well, something Trump and the US are being forced to confront. (Reuters: Brandon Bell/Pool)
The other day US President Donald Trump said: "With a communist in charge? Look, you just go back a thousand years, it's been done many times, a thousand years, it's never worked once."
He was talking about Zohran Mamdani, the leading candidate for New York City's mayoral election on November 4, who says he is a democratic socialist, not a communist. Close enough.
As for the thousand years, he must be talking about King Cnut the Dane who was ruling England in 1025, and who does seem to have been a bit of a Kim Jong-il-style communist, having inherited the Danish crown from his father before invading England, and commanded the tides not to rise and all that, although 1,000 years ago Karl Marx was 823 years away from inventing communism.
Anyway, Trump had forgotten that the previous day he had signed a critical minerals deal with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to try to counter China's dominance of their global supply.
Beijing's export-licence requirements on seven rare earths galvanised the Trump administration into action. (AAP: Lukas Coch)
China's capitalism 101 controls rare earths
To remind the president: China is both communist and working passably well, something he and the United States generally are being forced reluctantly to confront.
In fact, China is doing better than just working. Historian Adam Tooze pronounced on a podcast about the same time as Trump and Albanese were signing their deal that: "China isn't just an analytical problem; it is the master key to understanding modernity. [It] is the biggest laboratory of organised modernisation there has ever been or ever will be …"
But then, is China actually communist?
Well, it's ruled by the Communist Party and has been for 76 years, still with an official ideology of Marxism-Leninism "with Chinese characteristics", which seems to mean that it's a capitalist sort of communist country.
Indeed, China used capitalism 101 to get control of rare earths and critical minerals: that is the time-honoured tactic of loss leading, in which a business sells a product below cost to drive its competitors out of business and grab a monopoly.
The world's principal rare-earths mine, Mountain Pass in California, was driven out of business by China in 2002, and while it reopened in 2015 with a price guarantee from the Obama administration, it was too late — its 70 per cent global market share had become China's 70 per cent, which it still is.
In 2002, the US was busy invading Afghanistan and getting ready to invade Iraq and if America's leaders at the time thought about China at all, they thought that it would never amount to much … because, you know, they are communist losers.
At that point America was still basking in the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, and Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that the end of the Cold War marked the end of mankind's ideological evolution and the final victory of Western liberal democracy as the enduring form of human government.
Communism doesn't work was the general view, to which Trump apparently still cleaves.
Also, in 2002 China had just joined the World Trade Organization and embarked on the modernisation that Tooze describes as the biggest there has ever been or ever will be.
And now China is wiping the floor with America in just about every aspect of economic and industrial life.
A monument reads: "Home of rare earths welcomes you", in China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. (Reuters: David Gray)
Trump missing a 'Sputnik moment'
The 2002 closure of the Mountain Pass mine should have been a "Sputnik moment" for the United States, echoing the Soviet Union's launch on October 4, 1957, of the first satellite, Sputnik 1, which produced a huge, panicked national effort to invest in science and scientific education, leading to the creation of NASA, landing Apollo 11 on the Moon in 1969 and, eventually, to the invention of the internet and artificial intelligence (AI).
There was a bit of a Sputnik moment on February 4 this year when China's Ministry of Commerce announced new controls on exports of tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum and indium.
China supplies 80 per cent of the world's tungsten and bismuth, 67 per cent of tellurium and indium and 42 per cent of molybdenum.
The move to break China's iron grip on world's supply of critical minerals
China has created a vice-like grip on the mining, refining and production of global metals.
By the way, this was seven years after China's own Sputnik moment, when the US banned semiconductor exports to China and set China on a new and very focused economic course.
The logic for Beijing was simple: if the US could ban shipments of semiconductors, it might also ban chemical products, auto parts, or any number of key inputs. Becoming self-sufficient in everything became a matter of national security.
Chinese banks were told to stop lending to real estate and instead to lend hand over fist to anyone adding industrial capacity (note that the government didn't build the capacity itself, as a truly communist nation would — it was socialism with Chinese characteristics).
On March 20, Trump issued an executive order with "Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production", which was a long way short of what Dwight D Eisenhower did in 1957 in response to Sputnik 1.
On April 4, Beijing doubled down, adding export-licence requirements on seven rare earths — samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium — and made it clear these minerals would not be available for military applications.
That galvanised the Trump administration into action and negotiations for a deal to get hold of Australian rare earths were urgently commenced.
But there should have been some more Sputnik moments for the US this year, starting with the Chinese AI company, DeepSeek, unveiling its models on January 22 this year, at a fraction of the cost of American ones.
Everyone thought China was running a distant second in the AI race, but that turned out to be wrong.
Chinese robots at the shops
Then more recently, Chinese mega tech company Alibaba announced it had developed a pooling system called Aegaeon that reduced by 82 per cent the number of Nvidia GPUs (graphics processing units) needed to do AI.
And in the past few days here in Australia, there has been a small burst of publicity about robots in shopping centres prompted by a company called Bellbots, including an appearance on Kyle and Jackie O, and a story on Channel 9 news filmed with a robot at the new Silverdale mall in Penrith.
I rang up Andrew Bell, 36, founder, owner and CEO of Bellbots. At 17 he joined the army and a year later was sent to Iraq where, he says, he was exposed to a lot of tech (as well as bullets presumably).
His business idea is to put robots into shopping centres where he would rent a space to park and charge their batteries, and then have the machines wander around the centre (they are 1.5 metres tall, walk on two legs, talk, look a bit human, with a head but not a face, and are remarkably stable).
There will be two revenue streams as Bell sees it: advertising, with the robot voicing ads paid for by retailers to spruik their stores, and shoppers could also use an app to rent the robot to carry their shopping to the car (or discuss the meaning of life over a coffee?).
A video of the humanoid robots fighting in the China Media Group World Robot Competition in May. (Reuters: CCTV)
At least that's the plan. And where is he getting the robots from? China, and a company called Unitree.
Unitree launched its new generation of humanoid robots last week, called H2, with a video of it dancing to loud heavy metal music. Rudolph Nureyev it is not, but that the thing dances at all is progress.
Bell has bought one of Unitree's G1 machines, not the all-dancing H2 model, and has another nine on standby if he can get a deal with a shopping centre. He wouldn't tell me what he paid for it, but I'd guess it's about $20,000.
My son's reaction was: "Oh, these things are going to end up in the river!", which is probably true after what happened to e-bikes, so there's an insurance dimension to be worked out.
Bell says he would have liked to use Tesla's Optimus robot, which he loves the look of, but when he contacted them, they weren't interested and blew him off.
Unitree in China, on the other hand, was all over him: "They were open to anything we wanted to suggest, really on the ball."
If Chinese robots wandering around a shopping centre in Penrith spouting ads and carrying shopping to the car park isn't a Sputnik moment, and proof that communism works, I don't know what is.
Alan Kohler is finance presenter and columnist on ABC News and he also writes for Intelligent Investor.
Previously, in this post, there's been a few comments and views on the Government setting potential price floors for Rare Earth, more specifically, battery materials.
I found this article in the AFR quoting $PLS Chief Executive Dale Henderson as a view I subscribe to. Quite like how Dale operates PLS, including the strategic way he tippy toed around this issue so as not to alienate anyone that might send Government funds towards $PLS in the future!!
Happy reading:
Edit- Sorry, I should have stated in the original post, held IRL. Unfortunately held in SM until last week, which is obviously why the jump in SP
Lithium price floor could trigger ‘bad, unintended consequences’
Peter KerResources reporter
Oct 24, 2025 – 4.17pm
Lithium exporter PLS says bad and unintended consequences could result from a government plan to set minimum price floors for the battery mineral, and taxpayer funds may be better spent on shared infrastructure that lowers production costs across the sector.
A taxpayer-backed “price floor” for critical minerals has been touted by federal Resources Minister Madeleine King as part of work to develop a $1.2 billion “strategic reserve” of the metals needed for defence and decarbonisation applications.
PLS chief executive Dale Henderson said he was not necessarily opposed to a price floor, but the merits of the idea would depend heavily on its design.
PLS chief Dale Henderson says taxpayer money is better used building shared infrastructure. Ross Swanborough
“The devil is in the detail. If deployed the right way there could be positives, but equally there could be bad, unintended consequences,” he said.
“The concern people have in this regard is that the wrong projects get supported and it effectively becomes a waste of taxpayer funding and sets up an artificial circumstance. That is the situation we all want to avoid.
“However, if there is a construct that can successfully navigate that and ensure the right support flows to the strongest projects, maybe there is something there.”
The comments come after The Australian Financial Review revealed this week that some lithium miners were opposed to a price floor because they feared it could distort markets and keep weaker, less viable producers in the market for longer.
The concerns from established lithium miners raise doubts over whether the battery metal will be included in the first phase of the strategic reserve policy.
The reserve is expected to initially focus on providing price floors for Australian rare earths aspirants – a sector typified by companies trying to fund and build future projects, rather than incumbent producers with established supply contracts.
Henderson said the best way for governments to support the critical minerals sector was to build shared infrastructure, such as a clean energy network for the multiple miners working near PLS in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.
“It makes an abundance of sense to network together those mines and lever the full scale, so large-scale energy hubs coupled with large-scale network solutions,” he said.
Henderson also praised the $546.6 million of federal and state money that was being spent on construction of new, multi-user port berths at Lumsden Point near Port Hedland for lithium miners and clean energy developers.
“The common thread with each of these is, it lowers the cost for all. This investment pays back over decades and decades through multiple cycles,” he said.
Buying shares
“If you contrast that to deploying those same taxpayer funds to say, price support on the revenue side, that is not necessarily sustainable as compared to investing in long-term sustainable cost reductions.”
Taxpayer support for miners and explorers was traditionally provided by states in the form of drilling grants to stimulate new mineral discoveries or royalty holidays when commodity prices and revenues were weak.
In the past four years the federal government ramped up its support by making concessional loans to miners through agencies such as Export Finance Australia or the Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund.
More recently, Australian and US governments have embraced further risk by using taxpayer funds to buy shares in listed critical mineral companies, including Liontown Resources, Arafura Resources, Trilogy Metals and MP Materials.
Asked whether listed equities were a good way to deliver taxpayer support, Henderson said he didn’t have a firm view.
“The role of government, on the behalf of the people, is to support a competitive landscape for businesses, and one in which there is fair opportunity for businesses to strive,” he said.
“If there is selective ownership interest on the part of the government and particular projects, would that change that fair playground? Would it remain fair and unbiased? I am not sure, it’s an open question.”
PLS shares rose 7 per cent on Friday to briefly test their highest levels since June 2024.
The rally was driven by confirmation that a recovery in prices for lithium-rich spodumene concentrate had driven stronger revenue for PLS in the September quarter.
Spodumene concentrate was fetching $US865 ($1330) a tonne on October 23, according to S&P Global Platts; up from $US575 a tonne in June. But the commodity remains well below the $US8000 a tonne it was briefly fetching in early 2023.
PLS produces lithium at its Pilgan mine in the Pilbara, and Henderson said prices would need to be above $1200 a tonne for an extended period before PLS resumed production at the neighbouring Ngungaju hub, which is currently mothballed.
PLS’ cash balance was $852 million at September 30; down by $122 million in the past three months. The company’s cash balance has now declined in each of the past nine quarters since it stood at $3.33 billion at June 30, 2023.
The decline has been driven by spending on expansion projects that will allow the company to sell higher volumes, as well as tax payments, dividends and also lower income amid weak lithium prices.
21-Oct-2025:
See also AFR story:
‘We’ll have so much’: Trump taunts China with Albanese rare earths deal
by Jessica Gardner, AFR United States correspondent, Updated Oct 21, 2025 – 6.57am, first published at 5.32am.
Washington | Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and US President Donald Trump have agreed to invest a combined $US3 billion ($4.6 billion) in critical minerals projects and work together to loosen China’s grip on the crucial industry.
A framework for co-operating on critical minerals signed at the two leaders’ long-awaited White House meeting on Monday (Tuesday AEDT) includes offering guaranteed price floors for new producers and blocking asset sales on security grounds, in moves that are likely to anger Beijing.
“In about a year from now, we’ll have so much critical minerals and rare earths that you won’t know what to do with them. They’ll be worth about two dollars,” Trump, sitting next to a beaming Albanese, told reporters in the White House cabinet room.
The two countries will pump $US1 billion each into Australian and US projects over the next six months, including a $US200 million equity investment in a West Australian gallium plant owned by Alcoa and a $US100 million stake in the Gina Rinehart-backed Arafura Nolans rare earths mine.
The US will invest a further $US1 billion down the track. “This is an $US8.5 billion pipeline that we have ready to go,” Albanese said, referring to the equivalent of $13 billion in capital expenditure required for the projects in line for potential investment. “We’re just getting started.”
Fresh curbs on rare earth exports by China meant the meeting went ahead amid heightened tensions over the supply of the minerals used by manufacturers of everything from smartphones and jet engines to military hardware, wind turbines and electric vehicles.
Trump, however, said the US and Australia had been negotiating an agreement for the past four or five months that calls on both sides to intensify their efforts to secure minerals crucial to future security and prosperity.
Albanese said the deal showed that both sides were “seizing those opportunities which are before us to take our relationship to that next level”.
Read more: Albanese-Trump meeting
- Albanese touches down for critical Trump meeting
- Australia braces for China backlash from PM-Trump meeting
- ‘Play to Trump’s ego’: AFR readers wary over White House talks
- PM to meet White House mining gurus to help solve crisis
- Defence could be key to critical minerals deal with Trump
Awkward Rudd moment
The prime minister sailed through a joint 35-minute joint press conference, but there was one awkward interaction when Trump was asked about social media posts made by Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister and Australia’s serving ambassador to the US.
The US president, who had been asked in press interviews about the tweets before, said he did not know anything about the 2020 posts – where Rudd described Trump, after his first term, as the “most destructive” president in US history and a “traitor to the West”. He also said he did not know the Australian ambassador, who happened to be sitting across the cabinet table from him.
The White House meeting was briefly soured by an awkward moment when Donald Trump was asked about disparaging tweets Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, had made about him in the past.
When Albanese gestured towards Rudd, a close confidante of his, Trump asked him if it was true, before saying to Rudd: “I don’t like you either – and I probably never will.”
In a positive sign for Australia, however, Trump gave the AUKUS submarine sales and technology-sharing pact clear backing, despite an ongoing review by the Pentagon. “There shouldn’t be any more clarifications because we’re just going full steam ahead on building them,” he said.
Under the AUKUS agreement, which was signed by Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden, the US is set to sell Australia second-hand Virginia-class vessels from 2032. There has been concern that slow production rates mean those sales would undermine the US Navy’s fleet, leaving the country exposed in the Asia-Pacific and elsewhere.
“It was going too slowly,” Trump said. “We do actually have a lot of submarines, we have the best submarines anywhere in the world.
“With Anthony [Albanese] we’ve worked on this long and hard. I think it’s really moving along very rapidly, very well.”
Abe Denmark, a partner at The Asia Group and former Biden defence official, said the meeting “injected new momentum into the broader AUKUS partnership and delivered a landmark deal around crucial mineral access and joint investment that will further strengthen the bilateral relationship.”
“He’s done a fantastic job”
Albanese was among the last of America’s allies to sit down with Trump in his second presidency, prompting some observers to worry that the US president’s disruptive tariff policies and demands for Australia and other allies to spend more on defence had frayed the bilateral relationship.
The meeting was positive, however, and Trump expressed hopes he would be able to take up an invitation from Albanese to visit Australia. He noted that the Labor prime minister did very well at the May 2025 election and praised Australia for buying lots of US aircraft.
“I hear you’re very popular today,” Trump said. “It varies from day to day, as with all of us, but he’s done a fantastic job as the prime minister.”
Albanese, who was set to meet Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent later on Monday, emphasised the strong economic relationship between the two countries, stressing that Australia had a $50 billion trade deficit with the US.
Although Trump rails against countries that sell more to the US than they buy, preferring trade partners like Australia, there were no signs of a better deal on tariffs. The US imposes a flat 10 per cent tariff on imports from Australia, which Trump said was “very light”. Australian steel and aluminium exporters, however, are subject to near-universal 50 per cent levies.
Critical minerals framework explained
Albanese said there were three groups of projects that would benefit from the critical minerals framework.
Firstly, there was the immediate $US1 billion each would be invested in “joint activities” between the US and Australia with the Alcoa gallium operation and the Arafura Nolans rare earths mining project in the Northern Territory ready to go.
Second, the US would put some money into Australian processing projects, including one that would take in Japanese investment too.
Finally, Australia would make further investment in domestic products.
The signed document details that Australia and the US would support supplies of critical minerals and rare earths “through use of economic policy tools and coordinated investment to accelerate development of diversified, liquid, fair markets”.
As part of this intention, both sides will take steps to speed up project approvals, something that may draw opposition from environmental groups.
They will also work to strengthen the ability to “review and deter critical minerals and rare earth asset sales on national security grounds”, which may trouble Australian producers with Chinese investors.
Australian officials are bracing for a backlash from Beijing to the boosted co-operation between the US and Australia. China controls up to 90 per cent of the processing of some critical minerals, allowing it to distort markets in a way that undermines the establishment of new supply chains.
--- ends ---
Source: https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/albanese-and-trump-commit-to-8-5b-critical-minerals-pipeline-20251020-p5n3se
I expect this will further fuel the rocket that is already under REE/REO (rare earth) companies, and others considered to be "critical minerals" that are in short supply outside of China.
Also: Dateline Resources (ASX: DTR) - see here: https://www.afr.com/companies/mining/ex-macquarie-banker-s-mine-rockets-12-000pc-after-trump-shout-out-20251020-p5n3s4
Ex-Macquarie banker’s mine rockets 12,000pc after Trump shout-out
by Anne Hyland, AFR Companies editor, Oct 20, 2025 – 8.00pm
A small gold and critical minerals mine once owned by Alan Bond has turned into a $234 million paper fortune for former Macquarie executive Mark Johnson and attracted the backing of US President Donald Trump despite not having started drilling for rare earths.
In a reflection of the frenzy for stocks exposed to critical minerals, Dateline Resources, chaired by the 84-year-old Johnson, has seen its ASX-listed shares soar 12,000 per cent this year, prompting three queries about the jump from the sharemarket operator in as many months.
Dateline’s Colosseum mine in the US received approval from the Trump administration as America’s second rare earths mine. Getty
Dateline is exploring for gold and critical minerals in California, in an area that neighbours the Mountain Pass project of MP Materials, America’s largest rare earths producer. Johnson is the largest shareholder in Dateline, owning almost 15 per cent of its shares and nearly 100 million in options.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is in Washington this week meeting with Trump, and the creation of a critical minerals supply chain beyond the reach of Chinese authorities is at the top of the list of topics up for discussion. Expectations the Trump administration may take stakes in ASX-listed rare earths companies to bolster its supply chain have sent the share price of several highly speculative rare earths companies soaring.
AFR Weekend reported a string of rare earths hopefuls had spruiked invitations from Kevin Rudd, Australia’s ambassador in Washington, to meet with Trump administration officials, sending their shares soaring. The move is privately known among some brokers as the “Rudd ramp”.
But Dateline has an even more high-profile supporter: Trump. The US president wrote on his Truth Social platform in early May that Dateline’s Colosseum mine was “America’s second rare earths mine”.
“We are the pretty girl at the dance at the moment,” said Johnson, who spent more than five decades in banking and corporate finance, mostly at Macquarie, and was also the chairman of electricity and gas giant AGL Energy.
Mark Johnson is the largest shareholder in Dateline. “We haven’t drilled a rare earth resource yet but it’s highly prospective.” Andrew Quilty
“We can start mining as soon as we’ve done all the prudent work, then the feasibility study and put in place the infrastructure,” he said. “We haven’t drilled a rare earth resource yet but it’s highly prospective. Should that resource turn out to be real and proved up we can be in business well before anybody else in the US.”
At the start of the year, Dateline’s shares were trading at 0.003¢. They soared as high as 65¢ in October, and ended trade on Monday at 43¢.
China has a near monopoly on the supply of critical minerals and officials in the US and Australia have been working to bolster supply from other mines. Earlier this year, the Trump administration announced it would take a major stake in MP Materials, which is backed by mining magnate Gina Rinehart.
Rinehart, who made her fortune in iron ore, has increasingly favoured critical minerals. The country’s richest businessperson is now the largest shareholder in Lynas Rare Earths – one of the few suppliers outside China, with shares up 214.1 per cent this year – and Arafura Rare Earths.
Lynas, which has a mine in Western Australia and a refinery in Malaysia, signed a deal earlier this month with American manufacturer Noveon Magnetics to develop a rare earths supply chain in the US. The Biden administration had already granted almost $400 million to help Lynas build a heavy rare earths refinery in Texas in August 2023.
Source: Dateline Resources
“One hopes that there’s going to be closer cooperation among the two countries because clearly the US is the source of huge demand, and Australia, either because of its [critical minerals] resources or because of its technology and companies like Lynas [Rare Earths], is a material contributor to actually trying to redress some of the balance of the rare earth deficit that the West finds itself in,” said Johnson.
He wouldn’t rule out the possibility of US government investment in Dateline. “We would like to think so, we’ve got a way to go,” he added.
The former Macquarie banker has been associated with Dateline since the mid-1990s, when it was a copper and zinc project under a different name and had a project in Fiji, where Johnson was born. Dateline has since exited the Fiji project and acquired the Colosseum mines from Barrick Gold about a decade ago. Alan Bond’s Bond International Gold first developed Colosseum’s gold mine in the late 1980s, eventually selling the project to LAC Minerals, which Barrick Gold later acquired.
Johnson said that when Dateline conducted due diligence on the Colosseum project, the company tracked down people who had worked for Bond for advice on the development’s outlook.
Dateline chief executive Stephen Baghdadi, whose paper wealth is now estimated at about $160 million, is in Washington this week. Alongside other mining executives, he will be at a lunch hosted by BHP to mark its 140-year anniversary, which will also be attended by Albanese.
---ends ---
Source: https://www.afr.com/companies/mining/ex-macquarie-banker-s-mine-rockets-12-000pc-after-trump-shout-out-20251020-p5n3s4
[20-Oct-2025]
Discl: not held.
Despite today's announcement and news coverage, DTR is still experiencing profit taking; little wonder when they've run up from two tenths of one cent to almost 70 cents in recent months:
Perhaps the punters are realising that DTR isn't as special as they might have thought - as there seems to be more love being spread across more companies now - but as you say @Jarrahman and @Geez101 there will be some big winners here, and some very annoyed losers.
However, one thing being talked about now is the introduction of floor prices for some commodities, most probably heavy rare earths required for magnets being one area, to be implemented by both the Australian and U.S. Governments, and if that happens it's going to benefit all Australian and US producers of those minerals / metals / rare earths, because they will know the minimum price they will be able to sell for in future years, underpinned by the government.
FWTW.
In terms of the US Government's promises and guarantees, those can be scrapped or doubled with one "Truth Social" post, not so much down here in Oz though.
Discl: not held.
Rare Earth Stocks Surge on the ASX in Tuesday Trading
October 14, 2025
Companies in the rare earth sector have experienced significant gains in today's trading session on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). Investors have shown strong interest in the sector, driving up the share prices of key players from the market open.
Leading the charge is Australian Strategic Materials (ASM), which has seen its share price soar by over 50% since the opening bell. The company, focused on developing its Dubbo Project in New South Wales, has been a standout performer in a buoyant market for critical minerals.
Northern Minerals (NTU) has also seen a remarkable surge, with its share price jumping by nearly 48%. The company is advancing its Browns Range project in Western Australia, which is positioned to be a significant supplier of dysprosium and terbium, crucial elements for high-performance magnets.
Another significant mover is Arafura Rare Earths (ARU), with a more than 22% increase in its share value today. Arafura is developing the Nolans Project in the Northern Territory, which is slated to be a globally significant source of neodymium and praseodymium (NdPr).
The sector's largest producer, Lynas Rare Earths (LYC), has also enjoyed a positive day of trading, with its share price climbing by over 5%. As the only major producer of separated rare earths outside of China, Lynas continues to attract strong investor confidence.
Diversified miner Iluka Resources (ILU), which is expanding its involvement in the rare earths supply chain, has also seen a healthy rise of almost 15% in its share price. The company is progressing with its Eneabba refinery project in Western Australia, which will process stockpiled rare earth minerals.
The broad-based rally in rare earth stocks reflects a growing global demand for these critical minerals, which are essential components in a wide range of technologies, including electric vehicles, wind turbines, and advanced electronics.
