lynas ree prices drop to under $50, page-57

OMG, to emphasise what your saying in dollar terms it might be helpful to look at the values at various stages of the process.

No hard and fast numbers but using those from a research note prepared for HAS:

Product produced % of quoted price

Mixed RE concentrate 10% - 20% (I've seen 30% elsewhere)
Carbonate 80%
Oxide 100%

Clearly the big value add is separating the con. which implies the greatest degree of difficulty and particularly the SEG & HREE. Alkane have spent a huge amount of time and effort on their SEG & HREE with the full support of ANSTO without getting it right and must be very relieved to hand it off to the Japanese.

The next step to metals adds a further 30/50% but the big one is metals to magnets given Hitachi's patent control. Moly paid $1.3B for Neo because they have a patent license (although no current export license from China) whereas Lynas parlayed product into a JV with Siemans, who also have a patent license.