SMM Rare Earth Afternoon Trading Comment for September 18

This week, rare earth prices outside China remained generally stable, with terbium oxide and terbium metal both down $12/kg. On the policy front, Argentina and Brazil advanced legislation on national rare earth strategies, strengthening sovereign resource review and local processing requirements. On the industrial front, Neo’s Estonia magnet plant achieved its first commercial shipment of EV traction motor magnets; Saudi Arabia discovered 114 million mt of rare earth-uranium resources; Ucore received additional funding from the US Department of Defense to advance samarium and gadolinium separation. Overall, the ex-China supply chain is accelerating its transition from “resource competition” to a realization phase of “policy rights confirmation + separation scale-up + magnet delivery.”

[SMM Rare Earth Daily Review: Rare earth market prices continue to run in the doldrums, with limited actual transaction volume growth] Overall, the market today showed a divergent pattern of "oxides fully stable, metals alone declining": the Pr-Nd series has seen no changes for two consecutive days, while gadolinium, holmium, erbium, and other previously adjusted varieties have entered consolidation, with only dysprosium-iron alloy and terbium metal continuing to concede on price; the transaction side has yet to recover, with buyers and sellers still locked in a standoff at low levels, and metal producers' price concessions have brought only limited improvement in actual shipments. Downstream players are mainly engaged in price-comparison inquiries and just-in-time procurement, and the actual implementation of pre-holiday stockpiling remains the biggest variable at present.

[Pr-Nd and terbium both stop falling and stabilize, dysprosium series remains stable, magnetic material scrap continues to wait and see] Currently, although the supply of rare earth ion-adsorption ore in Southeast Asia has slightly recovered, oxide prices remain generally stable, and overall transaction prices for rare earth ore are in a stalemate.