RESEARCH
China's Rare Earth Refining Share for 2025 Splits 85% to 90% Across Trackers
Four independent 2025 assessments of China's grip on global rare earth processing land in a narrow but consequential band: the IEA's newest figure (85%) sits five points below the roughly 90% cited by CSIS, Mining Technology, and Rare Earth Exchanges. All four sources agree China's mining share (60-69%) trails its processing share by a wide margin -- the real chokepoint is midstream separation and refining, not ore extraction. April 2025 export controls on seven heavy rare-earth elements showed how much leverage that processing concentration still buys Beijing, regardless of which exact percentage is correct.
Findings
- The IEA's Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 pegs China's rare earth refining share at 85% for 2025, down from over 90% in 2023, crediting expanded output in the U.S. and Malaysia.
- CSIS's July 2025 analysis puts China's rare earth processing share at 90%, while separately estimating China's mine-production share at about 60% -- a 30-point gap between mining and processing control.
- Mining Technology's 2025 analyst comment cites 69.2% for China's mine output and "nearly 90%" for processing, aligning with CSIS on the high end but diverging from the IEA's 85% figure by roughly 5 percentage points.
- Independent of the exact refining-share number, every source agrees China's leverage flows from processing, not mining: April 2025 export controls on seven heavy rare-earth elements and related magnets triggered European prices reaching up to 6x Chinese domestic prices.
Delta Engine result
↔ Divergence Detected — Δ 0.3439 (threshold 0.05)
- CSIS T3 92
- IEA T5 65
- Mining Technology T2 85
- Rare Earth Exchanges T1 78
Evidence quality
avg 65 · min 40 · max 95 · spread 55