When Amanda Lacaze approved Lynas Rare Earths’ “Lynas 2025” expansion in 2019, neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr), the benchmark light rare earth alloy, sold for just $35 a kilogram. Plenty of people scoffed at the $1.5 billion price tag. Lacaze says she saw the crunch coming.
It has arrived. China holds more than 90% of the rare earth supply chain and has long kept prices low enough to discourage rivals. Recent export controls from Beijing changed the mood, and Washington and other governments have started pouring state money into the industry.
Price floors and new partners
Lynas has been a direct beneficiary. It agreed a $110 a kilogram price floor on NdPr in a four-year offtake deal with the US Department of War, which also committed $258 million toward a Lynas heavy rare earth refinement facility in Seadrift, Texas. The company has since signed a 10-year, $110 a kilogram floor with Japan and teamed up with two South Korean companies to build alloy and magnet plants in Vietnam and Malaysia. The Perth-based company’s value has risen 30 times over the past decade, to $15 billion.
Lacaze steps down at the end of June after 12 years as chief executive. TIME interviewed her at the Kuantan processing plant in Malaysia.
“We are evidence that with the right assets and the right level of determination, you can actually be successful in this market,” she said.
Not a partnership, a customer
She was blunt about the US relationship. The American offtake deal matters, she said, but it does not make Lynas’s top five contracts. “We don’t ‘partner’ with the U.S. government; the U.S. government policy is a customer, essentially.”
On the argument that price floors for Lynas and MP Materials pick winners, she answered that you cannot support people who do not produce, and that only those two companies make NdPr outside China. At $50 a kilo, she said, only the most efficient operators can survive. A sustainable price lets other projects reach the market.
Her preference is for governments to set policies that let companies succeed, including demand-side measures that change what customers buy. She named Japan as a market that handles Chinese pressure well, and said Lynas backs tax credits for magnet buyers.
Expansion and doubts
Lynas broke the Chinese monopoly on separated light rare earths in 2013 and on heavy rare earths in 2025. At Kuantan, the first job is to reach the plant’s nameplate capacity of 10,500 tonnes of NdPr a year, against 6,558 tonnes in the 2025 financial year. After that comes a new heavy rare earths separation circuit in Malaysia.
When it built its Kalgoorlie processing plant in Western Australia, she said, the company decided not to buy any equipment from China. Chinese engineers and chemists who once worked abroad, she added, are no longer allowed to.
The Texas project is less certain. “There is significant uncertainty as to whether the plant in Texas will proceed, and if so, in what form,” Lacaze said.
Kuantan has drawn protests over its social and environmental impact. Lacaze dismissed them as political. Lynas, she said, was “unlucky” to be picked as a political football by the opposition party of the day, and the remaining activists “seem almost to be just operating these days on muscle memory.” Her verdict: “We do not have a community problem.”
