China's New Critical Mineral Restrictions Will Cause Disruption Across Defense, Renewable Energy, Electronics and Manufacturing

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Exiger released proprietary research generated by its AI platform 1Exiger predicting the impacts of China's new export restrictions on tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, indium, and molybdenum. Exiger's research finds that the defense, renewable energy, electronics, and manufacturing sectors are particularly vulnerable to supply delays, material shortages, price increases, and supply bottlenecks.

Citing "national security interests," China now requires export control licenses to export 20 products related to these minerals. The move follows similar restrictions recently implemented on gallium, germanium, and antimony.

China is the top producer of the minerals implicated in new restrictions, all of which are widely used in U.S. civilian goods and defense products, including semiconductors, steel alloys, rechargeable batteries, engine parts, artillery shells, armor plating, airplane balancing weights, solar panels, ammunition, phone screens, nuclear reactors, and missiles.

The scope of China's export restrictions on the five minerals also includes a ban on the technology to process and refine the materials for their critical uses. This factor pressures rival economies to develop independent supply chains and creates both short- and long-term bottlenecks that could disrupt industries relying on these materials.

Using AI to predict harmful impacts in real-time

Using its 10 billion supply chain records, Exiger developed a dashboard illuminating more than 20,000 shipments of direct purchases of tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, indium, and molybdenum since the start of 2024. Exiger's proprietary GenAI capabilities enabled customers to immediately identify exposed supply chains and take steps toward risk mitigation.

Tungsten for machinery dominates 77% of shipments

Exiger's analysis indicates that of the five materials, tungsten was the top material shipped by value. Tungsten is a critical mineral in the U.S. for its applications in defense, aerospace, electronics, construction, metalworking, mining, and oil and gas drilling. Exiger  identified machinery as the leading consignee industry for U.S. tungsten shipments, dominating 77% of shipments. The U.S. is reliant on tungsten imports, as it stopped mining tungsten in 2015. China dominates the global tungsten market, controlling about 80% of the world's supply.

Weapons systems most impacted by bismuth restrictions

Leveraging Exiger's proprietary data catalog of hundreds of millions of part attributes used by the defense industry and federal government, Exiger identified bismuth as the leading impacted material in weapons systems by part count, followed by tungsten and tellurium. Exiger identified aircraft as the weapons system with the most parts containing the five impacted minerals.