"smelting" is NOT metal making, clearly you understand little of what you are reading.
This relaxation of foreign investment up to separation will quite obviously be designed to support Shenghe's ROW adventures, sourcing concentrate for the Motherland.
They have established minor equity positions, exercising a level of control as monopoly customer, leveraging the overcapacity in Chinese separation facilities. Value of concentrate unlikely to satisfy their equity partners LT so this development no doubt designed to allow Shenghe to throw them a few crumbs.
The result, leveraging China's built capacity in such a manner, makes it even more unlikely any ROW hard rock wannabe will raise the funding for independent separation, particularly given lack of customer engagement at any decent scale into relatively skinny downstream supply chains ex China.
Relatively aggressive moves by Shenghe and fairly rapidly growing imports of monazite feedstock really do raise some interesting Q re the viability of the Dragon's largest RE source as a by-product of a low grade IO operation, also noting they have recently developed a second concentrate stream from tailings.
LYC Price at posting:
$2.28 Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)