basketprice 1000us$, new qoutes, production, page-24

Hi Guys
The fact is China has about 80-90% of the world confirmed resources . For the past decades , Chinese REO resources have been vastly abused by illegal mining / trade , price dumping ( this actually made some the rare earth projects /production uneconomical particularly during the 1980's , thats why one of the reasons Molycorp was forced to shut down and Mt Weld 's economic feasibility doesn't look promising either note price of Ce at that time was as low as $3/kg .
China realised the economic consequences if not properly rationalize its rare earth resources , so they started to conserve their resources and also provide quota on export and the aims is to fully utilise it for high value processing and also trying to encourage foreign rare earth downstream high tech application to invest in China rather than buying cheap raw material(ie semi finished rare earth) .
Whether China will become a net importer or not , its still a number of years away ( probably 5 -10 years) but the reality is that they are not short of any rar earth at this stage but just enforce their development strategy listed above
Prices of rare earth will continue to rise as long as they continue to restrict on export and some of those projects eg Molycorp , ALK ,ARU will not come onstream not in another 5 years and above time . Mind you it is always take an average of 15 years for a rare earth project to come to reality because of the complexity of available technology !!!