Rising production costs could jeopardize growth in the Chinese e-car industry.
As the Bloomberg news agency reports, the Chinese government has taken the rising prices for rare earths as an opportunity to bring representatives of various industries to the table. A meeting organized by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology was attended yesterday (Wednesday) by representatives of the automotive sector and manufacturers of electronics and magnetic components, according to the report.
Currently, supply cannot satisfy the rapidly increasing demand for strategic raw materials. Accordingly, rising prices are driving up production costs in the automotive sector. To avoid stifling the industry’s growth, raw material producers were called upon at a January meeting to at least partially absorb the rising prices and not pass them on to electric vehicle manufacturers, Bloomberg adds. Prices for neodymium and praseodymium had recently reached new highs, and both materials are central to e-cars.
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