MPC’s Strategic Raw Materials Fund Framework
RARE EARTHS
China’s April 2025 rare earth export controls turned this framework from a thesis into an operational reality. Dysprosium and terbium reached up to six times Chinese domestic prices in European markets. The structural supply constraint this framework was built around is no longer theoretical.
MPC Strategic Raw Materials Stockpile Framework
Status Quo
China’s 2025 rare earth export controls — Wave One in April, Wave Two suspended until November 10, 2026 — have transformed the market environment this framework was designed to address. What was a forward-looking thesis in 2022-2023 is now a live operational challenge for every organisation with rare earth exposure.
As electrification, automation, and defence-related demand accelerate globally, critical raw materials — particularly rare earths and battery minerals — have become central to industrial and geopolitical strategy. Based on a global macroeconomic and industrial analysis, MPC developed the Strategic Raw Materials Stockpile Framework to explore how hard-asset-backed access to physical material can unlock downstream activity, investment confidence, and supply chain resilience outside China.
Our Strategy
Phase 1
Objective
Establish the foundational tools required to enable catalytic stockpiling, including physical material access, governance and control structures, storage and logistics capability, licensing considerations, and structured downstream engagement.
This phase is designed to reduce material-access risk and create early optionality—supporting feasibility work, qualification processes, and initial offtake discussions across refining, magnet production, and component manufacturing outside China.
Key Outcomes
A credible catalytic platform that demonstrates how controlled access to physical material can unlock downstream activity, investment confidence, and early industrial participation where supply constraints would otherwise stall development..
Phase 2
Objective
Establish the foundational tools required to enable catalytic stockpiling, including physical material access, governance and control structures, storage and logistics capability, licensing considerations, and structured downstream engagement.
This phase is designed to reduce material-access risk and create early optionality—supporting feasibility work, qualification processes, and initial offtake discussions across refining, magnet production, and component manufacturing outside China.
Key Outcomes
A credible catalytic platform that demonstrates how controlled access to physical material can unlock downstream activity, investment confidence, and early industrial participation where supply constraints would otherwise stall development..
Market & Supply-Chain Implications
The framework is grounded in the view that macro-economic forces—industrial policy, defence and energy-security priorities, and supply-chain concentration—are now primary drivers of availability and value, increasingly outweighing marginal cost curves alone. These dynamics introduce time asymmetry, where delays in capacity build-out materially affect outcomes.
Rather than treating demand as the limiting factor, the framework addresses the structural constraint common to non-Chinese supply chains: access to qualified material at the right point in time. This constraint creates asymmetric outcomes for projects and investors depending on timing, location, policy alignment, and downstream readiness.
A framework anchored in underlying physical assets provides exposure to structural dynamics that are difficult to replicate through financial instruments alone—particularly in environments shaped by licensing risk, export controls, delayed capacity expansion, and qualification bottlenecks. In this context, physical material access becomes a strategic enabler rather than a passive holding.
Our Investment Thesis
Since the framework was first articulated in late 2024, core commodity prices relevant to the framework have increased materially — in some cases by multiples. Dysprosium oxide reached up to six times the Chinese domestic price in European spot markets following Wave One controls. Terbium pricing followed a similar trajectory.
This evolution has reinforced the framework’s underlying assumptions around timing, concentration, and the strategic role of physical material access in enabling resilient value chains outside China. The window to act is the November 2026 suspension period — not after Wave Two enforcement.
Contact / Engagement
The MPC Strategic Raw Materials Stockpile Framework is applied within confidential advisory and interim executive engagements and shared selectively as a decision-support and thought-leadership construct.
It signals that the analytical work has been done, assumptions tested, and structural dynamics understood — so that when the right partners and capital are ready to move, MPC can move with them immediately.
To discuss the framework or explore how it applies to your organisation’s current supply chain situation, book a 30-minute call via the link in MPC’s LinkedIn featured section or contact office@mpconsulting.au directly.