Gallium, Germanium, and the Licensing Weapon

1The sequence, briefly

August 2023: China imposes export licensing on gallium and germanium - niche metals essential to power semiconductors (GaN), RF chips (GaAs), infrared optics and fibre (Ge). December 2023: graphite, the anode of every lithium battery. September 2024: antimony, the hardener in munitions and flame retardants. December 2024: an outright ban on gallium, germanium and antimony exports to the United States specifically. Spring 2025: licensing extended across heavy rare earths and finished magnets, briefly idling Western auto lines until licences flowed.

The pattern is the point: each control lands on a market where China's grip is processing capacity, not ore. Gallium is a by-product of aluminium refining; the West stopped refining it because margins were thin, not because it cannot.

2Why heavy rare earths are the sharpest edge

Neodymium magnets get headlines, but the binding elements are the heavies - dysprosium and terbium - that let magnets survive heat in EV motors and military systems. Their separation happens almost entirely in China, and a large share of the ionic-clay feedstock has come from northern Myanmar - Kachin state - where mining, smuggling and the civil war are inseparable. Our conflict desk has Myanmar at HIGH today: 45 coded events on 279 articles in the last 24 hours. A war most markets ignore sits directly inside a supply chain the Pentagon cannot ignore.

MP Materials (MP) is the US flagship response - mining at Mountain Pass, building magnet capacity with Department of Defense support - and light rare earths are increasingly covered. Heavy separation at scale outside China remains the gap (Lynas's Texas facility the main Western attempt).

3Who actually feels each control

Gallium: GaN power electronics and RF - defence radar (LMT, RTX, NOC downstream) and fast chargers; prices for Western buyers multiplied after the ban, but volumes are small enough that the pain is lead time, not P&L, for most. Germanium: infrared optics - thermal sights are a munition of this decade's wars - plus fibre and space solar cells. Antimony: ammunition primers and hardened lead; the West's re-armament runs straight into it. Magnets: the 2025 licensing round proved autos, not weapons, are the fastest transmission channel - assembly lines measure inventory in days.

The common consequence is a security premium: Western buyers now pay above world price for non-Chinese units of all of these, when they can get them - the same jurisdictional split the uranium market has already made permanent.

4Watchpoints

Licence approval tempo out of Beijing (the throttle is the message), US/EU stockpile purchases and DoD offtake deals of the MP type, progress at Western heavy-separation projects, and our own Myanmar theatre level - Kachin escalation has repeatedly preceded feedstock disruption. The falsifier for the structural thesis: sustained licence normalisation and a Western heavy-REE separation line running at scale. Neither is on the board today.

Sources and method

Compiled from public filings, government and agency data and trade press, cross-checked against our desks where they overlap. Supply shares and lead times in private industrial chains are estimates, are labelled as estimates, and the ones we could not verify this week are under what we do not know rather than asserted. The lines below are the factual spine.

• China refines ~90%+ of gallium and dominates germanium and heavy-REE separation (USGS)
• Export controls sequence 2023-2025 as tabled above (MOFCOM announcements)
• Conflict desk, 24h window 2026-07-29: Myanmar theatre HIGH - 45 coded events, 279 articles
• Spring 2025 magnet licensing briefly idled Western auto production until licences issued (industry reporting)

Underlying sources

• MOFCOM export-control announcements (2023-2025)
• USGS mineral commodity summaries - gallium, germanium, antimony, REE
• MP Materials and DoD announcements
• Parallax conflict desk - Myanmar theatre (2026-07-29: HIGH, 45 events, 279 articles)

Written by Parallax Research's research writer on 2026-07-29 and reviewed against the dossier it was given. Figures are as of that date and are not updated in place. Our scoring model's out-of-sample AUC is published in the whitepaper; nothing here is a forecast.