Rare earth companies outside China: who separates, who makes magnets

As of August 2026 the five are MP Materials, Lynas Rare Earths, Neo Performance Materials, Solvay and Serra Verde.¹ Four of them separate individual rare earth oxides. Serra Verde, in Brazil, sells a mixed rare earth carbonate that someone else has to separate.

The rest of the Western list is either pre-revenue or earns its money from something other than rare earths. Of the 15 Western names with a real profile, 9 booked zero rare earth revenue in their latest reporting period.² Energy Fuels is one of the 9, and it has separation capacity.

Separation is the step to watch, because it is where the choke point sits. Why it takes so much chemistry to pull one rare earth away from its neighbors is in are rare earths rare?.

The price floor exists because the market price would not keep a Western producer alive. None of this had to happen. Mountain Pass in California, the same mine MP Materials runs today, was the world's dominant source of rare earths from 1965 through the mid-1980s.³

What ended it was the waste. The EPA's own account records repeated failures of the pipeline that carried wastewater from the site to evaporation ponds in the desert, with spills onto the soil along the way.⁴ The cleanup and the permits got expensive at the moment Chinese producers started selling the same materials for less, and the mine stopped digging in 2002.⁵

The decision was rational for every individual actor. A private company cannot lose money for 15 years to hold a strategic position, because its shareholders will not let it. A state can. That asymmetry is why the deadlock never clears on its own, and why a government usually has to break it.

The Department of War deal with MP Materials

In July 2025 the US Department of War bought US$400 million of MP Materials preferred stock and took a warrant. Together they came to about 15% of the company.⁶ The same package set a floor of US$110 per kilogram on MP's neodymium and praseodymium (NdPr), the oxide pair that goes into magnets. The floor runs from 1 October 2025 to 31 December 2035. When the market price is below US$110, the government pays MP the difference every quarter. Once MP's new magnet plant in Texas, the 10X Facility, runs at full capacity, the government takes 30% of any price above the floor.⁶

That is a subsidy. If a Chinese system works efficiently and outcompetes you, you are pushed into a state-subsidized system of your own.

For the fourth quarter of 2025 alone, MP recognized US$51.0 million of income from the price floor.⁷

The same US$110 appears in two more agreements

Within 9 months the same number turned up twice more, both times with Lynas. Japan's JARE agreed a US$110 floor with Lynas on 10 March 2026, and the Department of War signed a letter of intent with Lynas at US$110 on 16 March 2026.⁸

The USGS records the 2025 average price of NdPr oxide at US$69 per kilogram, and the 2024 average at US$55.⁹ The floor was struck at twice the 2024 average and about 1.6 times the 2025 average.

The floor was needed because the two biggest producers outside China earn very little at market prices. Lynas is the largest rare earth producer outside China. In the year to 30 June 2025 it turned A$556.5 million of revenue into A$8.0 million of net profit.¹⁰ That is a margin of 1.4%, in a year of record NdPr production.

MP Materials has what I consider the best ore body in the Western Hemisphere. In 2024, on record production, its materials segment, which covers the mine and the separation plant, lost US$14.1 million of adjusted EBITDA. It returned to a positive US$16.8 million in 2025, and it got there by recognizing the US$51.0 million of government price income.¹¹

MP has also stopped reporting the market price it gets for its main product. Its 2025 annual report tells its own investors that the NdPr realized price is "no longer meaningful in evaluating and understanding our business or operating results" because of the price floor.¹¹ For the largest rare earth producer in the United States, a government number has replaced the market price.

No exchange and no futures

There is no exchange and no futures contract for any of this.¹² A new rare earth project carries its full price risk for its entire life. A copper mine can lock in revenue on the day it starts building.

Money committed and money delivered

CSIS counted more than US$7.3 billion committed across 5 US government departments and agencies by April 2026.¹³ Announcements across all sources run well past US$15 billion. The cash the research behind the video could verify as delivered into a US rare earth company through 30 June 2026 is about US$714 million, and essentially all of it went to MP Materials.¹⁴

The listed names fall into 4 groups by where they sit in the chain: separators, makers of metals, alloys and magnets, recyclers, and the companies listed in China. One fund holds a basket across them. That makes 11 companies and 1 fund, from the one with a government price floor to the ones still spending money to reach revenue. Tickers are as I gave them in the video, corrected where I misspoke.

Group 1: the separators

MP Materials (NYSE: MP) is the only integrated American operation, with mining and separation on one site, and it is building metals and magnet capacity in Texas. The government is now its shareholder, its price setter and its customer.¹⁵ I call it the designated national champion. The risk is that its economics depend on that relationship today. A better way to extract rare earths could also change its position.

Lynas Rare Earths (ASX: LYC) is the largest producer outside China. Its plant in Malaysia separated dysprosium in May 2025 and terbium in June 2025, the first commercial separation of those two outside China, and it is the only proven commercial heavy rare earth separator outside China.¹⁶ The honest number is that it produced 62 tons of dysprosium and terbium combined in the full financial year to 30 June 2026.¹⁶ World use is somewhere around 1,500 to 2,000 tons of dysprosium and 400 to 500 tons of terbium a year. Those denominators are estimates, because nobody publishes audited figures.¹⁷ Why those two elements decide whether a motor magnet survives heat is in dysprosium and terbium, the heavy rare earths that decide electric motors.

Neo Performance Materials (TSX: NEO) separates in Estonia and makes magnets in Europe.¹⁸ Solvay (Euronext: SOLB) started rare earth production for permanent magnets on a new line at La Rochelle in France in April 2025.¹⁹ Both are real operating plants outside China, and both are small against the Chinese base.

Group 2: metals, alloys and magnets

This step is tighter still. USA Rare Earth (Nasdaq: USAR) makes metals and magnets and is buying its way along the chain.²⁰ Energy Fuels (NYSE American: UUUU) has separation capacity and is acquiring Vacuumschmelze, a German magnet maker, and it booked zero rare earth revenue through the first half of 2026.²¹ REalloys (Nasdaq: ALOY) is at an earlier stage again.²²

Group 3: recycling, the frontier bet

Mkango Resources (MKA, listed in Toronto and London) is in recycling through HyProMag.²³ Ionic Rare Earths (ASX: IXR) is the other name in this group. Recycling recovers over 90% of the rare earths inside the process, and under 1% of rare earths is collected and recycled at the end of a product's life.²⁴ The gap between those two numbers is the entire opportunity and the entire problem.

The companies listed in China

In my opinion most Western investors skip the companies that actually own this industry, and those are listed in China. JL MAG Rare-Earth, the magnet maker, is listed in Shenzhen as 300748 and in Hong Kong as 06680.²⁵ China Northern Rare Earth (Shanghai: 600111) is the largest separator exposed to the constraint.²⁶ That is layer 7 of my framework, geopolitical access, showing up inside an ordinary brokerage account.

One fund

The VanEck Rare Earth and Strategic Metals ETF (REMX) holds a basket across these groups. At the end of 2025 its holdings included China Northern Rare Earth, Lynas and MP Materials, and it held no JL MAG.²⁷

The risks belong in one block, because they are connected.

• 9 of the 15 Western names have no rare earth revenue at all.²
• The sector is consolidating fast enough that the field may look different in a year.
• Every producer outside China is exposed to a price China can move. The US$110 floor exists to offset that, and the floor depends on a law Congress has been extending a few months at a time, most recently to 11 December 2026.²⁸ The dated steps on both sides are in China's rare earth export controls, a dated timeline.
• The figure that China refines over 99% of the world's dysprosium and terbium comes from a single commercial source, Adamas Intelligence.²⁹
• Australian Strategic Materials has been suspended from its exchange since 19 August 2026, the day its takeover by Energy Fuels took effect.³⁰
• In June 2026 China added the two American champions, MP Materials and USA Rare Earth, to its export control list.³¹

A new separation process

A small company caught my eye: Maglut, out of Long Beach, California. It calls its process precision purification, and it is redesigning the separation steps from the start.³² Maybe that is the way forward. This is no endorsement of the company. It is my own observation of the science in this sector.

Read the groups above as positions in the chain. None of them is a recommendation.

I am not a financial advisor. I am not paid by any of these companies. I have followed MP Materials for a long time and I am building a position in it, so that should be stated very clearly. In this whole series, the only two companies I have invested in are MP Materials and ServiceNow.

What I am trying to teach is how to think about layers. I am in the business of identifying threats and opportunities in a sector, and this channel will stay in that spirit.

To test this map yourself, start with the filings in the notes: MP's annual report, Lynas's results and the USGS price table. Then ask of any name where the bottleneck is and whether it sits on it, and do your own due diligence before you invest in anything.