China's Export Controls on Antimony Cause Supply Shortages
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NEW YORK, June 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- In 2024, China announced export controls on antimony. It's a metal most people have never heard of, but antimony goes into more than 200 types of military munitions. Within weeks, the price went from $1,400 per ton to $38,000 — a 2,600% spike — and shipments to the United States fell 97%. Companies mentioned in today's commentary includes: Realloys Inc. (ALOY), Kratos Defense & Security Solutions (NASDAQ: KTOS), MP Materials (NYSE: MP), USA Rare Earth (NASDAQ: USAR), Critical Metals Corp (NASDAQ: CRML), NioCorp Developments (NASDAQ: NB).
Today, Beijing is setting up for something bigger. And REalloys (ALOY) — a U.S.-based mine-to-magnet rare earth company — has spent years getting ready for it. The company holds an exclusive 80% offtake from the only non-Chinese rare earth processing plant in North America capable of processing heavy rare earths. And it operates its own metallization facility in Euclid, Ohio, and plans to source feedstock from the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Kazakhstan, and Greenland, which means no Chinese inputs at any step.
The heavy rare earth materials at the center of China's next mineral weaponization, like dysprosium and terbium, are precisely the ones REalloys has spent years positioning to supply.
While they're less widely discussed than light rare earths, heavy rare earths are the metals inside every drone motor, every missile guidance system, and every fighter jet engine the Pentagon fields. And in recent years, we've already seen Beijing tightening the screws on what are quickly becoming the most important elements on earth.
China's Pattern Is Years in the Making
What happened with antimony wasn't an isolated incident. It was just the latest chapter in a long history of escalations from China that have only been picking up steam over the past three years. In July 2023, Beijing imposed export licensing on gallium and germanium — two metals critical to semiconductors and infrared optics. In August 2024, they did the same with antimony before prices spiked 2,600% and shipments collapsed. In December 2024, China escalated to an outright ban on gallium, germanium, and antimony exports to the United States. Then in April 2025, Beijing put seven heavy rare earth elements under export licensing — including dysprosium and terbium, the two materials that keep magnets stable at the extreme temperatures inside jet engines and drone motors.
And in October 2025, China went even further, restricting the export of rare earth processing technology itself and asserting jurisdiction over any foreign-made product containing even trace amounts of Chinese-origin rare earth content. Every one of those moves has made REalloys' supply chain — built entirely outside China's reach — more valuable than it was the day before.
It's Already Showing Up in the Numbers
You don't have to guess what the rare earth version of the antimony spike will look like. The early signals are already in the pricing data. Terbium — one of the two heavy rare earths at the core of military-grade magnets — is up 103% just this year. Dysprosium and terbium from non-Chinese sources are now trading at three to four times Chinese domestic prices — a split that didn't exist two years ago. Meanwhile, China's rare earth magnet exports to the United States fell 22.5% year-over-year in the first two months of 2026, even as overall magnet exports rose.
A two-price world is forming, which threatens militaries all across the Western world. It's one where you're charged one rate if you buy from China, and a dramatically higher one if you don't. That gap? It's only widening.
REalloys operates entirely on the non-Chinese side of that divide. That means its output could be priced at a premium, and its supply chain is one of the only ones that can actually deliver.
How Far Ahead is REalloys?
Antimony showed what happens when a single mineral gets weaponized and there's no backup supplier. REalloys has been building the backup for heavy rare earths, and the head start has put them as far as three to seven years ahead of the competitors trying to start today.
The processing side runs through the Saskatchewan Research Council's Rare Earth Processing Facility, where REalloys has already secured the majority of output under an exclusive operating agreement. From there, the Company plans to send the oxides to Euclid, Ohio, where the company plans to convert them into the defense-grade metals and alloys as magnet-ready inputs that contractors actually purchase.
On the feedstock side, REalloys has already signed an agreement with the highest-grade rare earth deposit in the United States, adding to its existing sources in Canada, Brazil, Kazakhstan, and Greenland. That means there's no single point of failure and no Chinese technology, chemicals, or equipment at any critical step.
Plus, earlier this year, the company demonstrated a patent-pending process that eliminates dangerous hydrofluoric acid from a key stage of rare earth metal production — potentially cutting costs further, simplifying its infrastructure, and removing one of the world's most hazardous chemicals in the process.
The Deadline That Makes All of This Urgent
After years of watching supply chain cracks expand across the defense sector, the Pentagon finally drew a line in the sand. That's because the new DFARS procurement rules taking effect January 1, 2027, will ban Chinese-origin rare earths from the entire U.S. defense supply chain — every stage from mining through finished product.
Billions in annual Pentagon contracts are expected to require fully compliant sourcing by the cutoff, forcing every defense prime from Lockheed Martin to Northrop Grumman to prove their heavy rare earth supply chains are clean before the clock runs out. All of this is happening as the Pentagon's demand for rare earth magnets is expected to triple by 2030 to roughly 10,000 tons annually.
In March, the company closed an upsized $50 million public offering, directing roughly $40 million toward building the largest heavy rare earth metallization facility outside China. Just days later, the company appointed Joe Kasper — the former Chief of Staff to the U.S. Secretary of Defense — as Chair of its Advisory Board. He will be advising Board Members like highly decorated retired U.S. Army four-star general and foreign policy expert, General Jack Keane, and Board Chair, Steve duMont, who serves as President of GM Defense.
What the Antimony Spike Should Have Taught Us
Antimony wasn't exactly a mineral that kept anyone up at night before 2024. But when China cut exports, prices jumped 2,600%, and suddenly every weapons manufacturer in the country realized they were holding a single thread connected to Beijing.
The problem is, heavy rare earths make antimony look small by comparison. Dysprosium and terbium are woven through every major weapons system in the American arsenal, including drone navigation, missile guidance, and fighter jet engines running at extreme temperatures. And China doesn't just control most of the ore—they control the refining as well, which means they have the same leverage with rare earths that they just showed they're willing to use with antimony.
With the DFARS deadline now months away, defense contractors could soon be cut off from Chinese rare earths across the entire supply chain. Most of them still don't have a domestic source ready to go.
REalloys has been building the answer while everyone else is just now becoming aware of how severe the problem is. It has the metallurgical expertise and the operational partnerships. As 2027 gets closer and the supply pinch hits, that's the kind of position that could change the entire landscape for domestic rare earth production.
Other companies to keep an eye on:
On the company's first-quarter earnings call, an analyst asked CEO Chris Calio point blank: with
Kratos Defense & Security Solutions (NASDAQ: KTOS) jumped more than 14 percent in a single session this spring on reports that the Pentagon is exploring direct funding, and possibly equity stakes, in U.S. drone makers, with Kratos named among the likely candidates. It landed on top of a quarter the company had already used to raise its full-year guidance to a range of $1.70 billion to $1.76 billion, after first-quarter revenue hit $371 million, up nearly 23 percent from a year earlier, on a record backlog approaching $2 billion.
Much of that growth runs through the XQ-58A Valkyrie drone, which Kratos is scaling from eight units a year toward roughly 40 by late 2027 as it enters Marine Corps production. Every one of those airframes needs motors built around rare earth permanent magnets, the same dysprosium- and terbium-based magnets that REalloys and its peers are trying to keep out of Chinese hands.
MP Materials (NYSE: MP) spent years as a miner that dug up rare earth concentrate and shipped most of it overseas for processing. That changed when the Pentagon took a 15 percent equity stake in the company and locked in a 10-year price floor for neodymium-praseodymium products, and it changed again in February when MP picked Northlake, Texas, as the site for its $1.25 billion 10X magnet manufacturing campus.
The first-quarter numbers back up the pivot: MP produced a record 917 metric tons of NdPr oxide, up 63 percent year over year, and posted $132.9 million in combined revenue and price-floor payments.
USA Rare Earth (NASDAQ: USAR) hit a milestone in March that several of its peers are still chasing: it commissioned its first commercial magnet production line at its Stillwater, Oklahoma facility, clearing the way to start filling customer orders for sintered neodymium-iron-boron magnets this quarter. The company expects that single line to ramp toward 600 tonnes of annual capacity by year-end, with a second line set to roughly double total output by early next year.
USA Rare Earth has also been busy on the deal side, signing a distribution agreement with Arnold Magnetic Technologies and announcing plans for a second magnet facility in Blacksburg, South Carolina.
Critical Metals Corp (NASDAQ: CRML) most relevant move for this story is its connection to REalloys itself. In May, the two companies signed a binding 15-year offtake agreement covering 15 percent of Phase 1 production from Critical Metals' Tanbreez deposit in southern Greenland, one of the largest known heavy rare earth resources outside China. The deal commits REalloys to buying dysprosium- and terbium-rich concentrate that Critical Metals hasn't mined yet.
That's possible because Critical Metals spent the past year consolidating control of the project, taking its ownership stake to 92.5 percent after Greenland's government approved the final transfer in April.
NioCorp Developments (NASDAQ: NB) spent February doing something most junior critical minerals developers only talk about: it broke ground. Construction crews began excavating the main access portal for the company's Elk Creek project in southeast Nebraska, a roughly $44.6 million effort that marks the shift from planning into physical construction.
Elk Creek's primary products are niobium, scandium and titanium, all critical to defense and aerospace alloys, but NioCorp is also evaluating production of magnetic rare earths, including neodymium, praseodymium, terbium and dysprosium, the same elements at the center of REalloys' metallization work.
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