basket price falling, page-7

The basket price appears to be falling for two reasons. One is due to problems the Chinese are having with their forced consolidations. Beijing has not provided adequate compensation funds for the companies to stop production in Inner Mongolia and therefore some have not stopped as anticipated.

Second, it now appears that much of the rare earth price rise in China has been due to hoarding, anticipating further price rises, by companies along the supply chain.

Both these reasons affect not only internal prices, but export prices as well. Also the Chinese are concerned about prices to downstream users in China, but hard to say what the main impetus is.

The consensus inside China by market participants is that prices retrace a good chunk of this years price increase before rising again, as these problems are dealt with.