News: LYC UCore, Materion team up to apply for U.S. military rare earths funding, page-8

Neo, you make some good points in the first para, the second is blatant cross promotion of an ambulance chaser that has nothing in over a decade but fail at a number of different efforts to attract Govt charity, basically a bunch of mktg guys that have not produced one shred of economic data to even suggest they may have a remotely viable business plan.

Two of the key aspects of the current US proposals RE that are hugely encouraging is firstly that it is NOT about HRE in isolation, minor component in reality, but a total ex China NdFeB & SmCo magnet supply chain, secondly it is strongly focused on a commercial operation that will prove sustainable. A frank admission DoD RE oxides needs are two bits of nothing, and HRE oxide needs are a fraction of that!

One of the major Lynas advantages is current customer engagement Japanese mag makers, currently supplying 90% of inputs, effectively Lynas already has the commercial offtake to make the Blueline JV economically viable from the first kg of Tb/Dy produced, and beyond that Lynas already has a strong relationship with the Jap mag maker that is highly likely to make an application for NdFeB tender. We are only seeing a very small part of the total project in the public domain ATM, one of the minor components of five:

LRE processing
HRE processing
Metal & Alloy manufacture
NdFeB manufacture
SmCo manufacture (likely to be won by existing Arnolds US)

Break down ROW HRE demand, and probably ~90% revenues would be Tb & Dy into the NdFeB magnet industry which does not exist in the US, and Dy probably 80-100tpa & Tb 20-25tpa, quite likely some of that going into stockpile.

DyO = $20M - $25M + TbO $10M- $12.5M, call it $35M + $5M balance, optimistically $10M input costs + $10M OpEx, $40M revenues less $20M CoP = $20M gross profit.

And that's very optimistically based on totally disrupting existing supply which won't happen, a more realistic estimate probably much closer to $10M pa.

Put into perspective some of these frantic last minute efforts by RE companies, without a business, to cobble together multiple enterprises into something that looks remotely like a supply chain on a PDF, with the potential earnings ~$10Mpa, perhaps growing to $20Mpa over time.

Should the US be serious about sponsoring a commercial operation, with the objective a competitive China & sustainable ability to supply DoD with its NdFeB requirements, there really is only one serious option.