for the first time Apple iPhone sales in China have been greater...

for the first time Apple iPhone sales in China have been greater than its total sales in the developed world

Minerals such as neodymium are used in magnets that make speakers vibrate to create sound. Europium is a phosphor that creates a bright red on an iPhone screen. Cerium gets put into a solvent that workers use to polish devices as they move along the assembly line. "Your iPhone doesn't work without rare earths in there, " said Mark Smith, chief executive of Molycorp.

http://www.cnet.com/au/news/digging-for-rare-earths-the-mines-where-iphones-are-born/

There are, however, two new things to consider

The first new thing is the post WWII boom in first American, then European, Japanese and Chinese, and soon Indian GDP with the concomitant rise of the largest number of “middle class’ earners in human history. Middle class can be defined as those who have significant disposable (so called discretionary) income after paying for food, shelter, and health care, the basics.

The second factor is that rare, scarcely produced materials, were available in previously unheard of quantities just after WWII and their newly discovered electronic properties allowed their use in device components as signal detectors, signal modulators, and ultimately even as voltage controlled current switches. This allowed the inventions of the transistor, the integrated circuit, the electronic “switch” (replacing mechanical relays) and the color display.

the gadget cycle, the manufacturing for which drives the demand for technology metals and materials will continue just as before with one big difference: Initial demand for the “latest” technology although still coming from the ‘Big Top’ of American society will now begin to shift its geographical center to Asia as the growth of the Chinese and shortly the Indian economies continue to be the global drivers for wealth creation

The facts are that China’s middle class is growing; and that the Chinese economy has already created a very large number of upper class gadget and positional good consumers; and that India is now accelerating its economy towards the same goals of rapid GDP growth fueled first by infrastructure growth and then by consumerism.

this means HREE production in SE Asia that the world’s second and soon-to-be third largest economies governing the lives of 1/3 of the earth’s peoples that HREEs are to be sought after avidly now and for perhaps the next two decades.

To expand the markets for consumer electronics from today’s size to that of tomorrow’s it is critical that HREEs be brought into production outside of China. Otherwise the age of consumer electronics technology will be more and more restricted to the Big Top.

In either case though the production of HREEs are a great investment. (anyone know a good HREE company to invest in?)

See more at: http://investorintel.com/rare-earth...earth-elements/#sthash.32f5Bl1a.xZkMD063.dpuf