Highlights
- China produces over 85% of the world's rare earth magnets.
- Top manufacturers like JL MAG produce 20,000+ tonnes annually.
- Western capacity remains minimal at under 7% for Japan and far less for North America.
- Sintered NdFeB magnets deliver up to 50 MGOe strength, ideal for use in EVs, wind turbines, and defense systems.
- Bonded magnets offer design flexibility at the cost of power, making them suitable for electronics, sensors, and consumer devices.
- U.S. firms like MP Materials, Noveon Magnetics, and Vulcan Elements aim to build domestic magnet production capacity targeting 10,000 tonnes/year each.
- Policy rollbacks on EV incentives threaten to undercut the demand needed to sustain reshoring efforts.
Rare earth permanent magnets are the invisible engines behind modern technology. They hum inside electric vehicles, spin turbines, guide missiles, and even vibrate your smartphone. But as the world races toward electrification and digitalization, a critical question looms: who controls the magnets—and what kind?
At the center of this race are two distinct classes of neodymium magnets: sintered and bonded. Both use the same base chemistry (NdFeB), but their structure, strength, and strategic value diverge dramatically. As nations scramble to secure rare earth supply chains, understanding these differences is no longer a technical footnote—it’s a geopolitical imperative.
Table of Contents
As a reminder, about 90% or more of all rare earth-based magnets are still manufactured in China.
North American rare earth magnet demand in 2025 is not precisely quantified in tons, but projections and data from related sectors suggest it's a significant and growing market. For example, the U.S. is estimated to have around 10,000 tons of annual consumption, with demand from EV motors alone reaching an estimated 37,000 tons in 2024.
Some Estimates
- Estimated total U.S. consumption: ~10,000+ tonnes/year
- EV markets: ~37,000 tonnes of magnet-grade rare earths consumed globally in 2024; rising to ~43,000 in 2025
- Defense industrial base: 3,000–4,000 tonnes/year
- Global magnet demand: Approaching ~385,000 tonnes in 2025
- Dependence: North America still imports the overwhelming majority of refined materials and finished magnets
Sintered vs. Bonded: Not All Magnets Are Created Equal
Sintered magnets are brute-force powerhouses. They're formed by pressing NdFeB powder into dense blocks and baking them at high heat. The result: a hard, brittle, ultra-powerful magnet that can lift dozens of times its own weight and keep its strength in high-heat conditions. These are the magnets powering EV drivetrains, wind turbines, fighter jets, and precision medical devices.
Bonded magnets, by contrast, are finesse operators. Instead of sintering, they mix the powder with polymers and mold it into complex shapes. They’re lighter, cheaper, corrosion-resistant, and can be manufactured into intricate geometries—ideal for miniaturized electronics, automotive sensors, and appliance motors. What they sacrifice in brute strength, they make up for in flexibility.
Key Comparison: Sintered vs. Bonded
| Aspect | Sintered NdFeB | Bonded NdFeb |
|---|---|---|
| Magnetic Strength | Up to ~50 MGOe | Less than 10 MGOe |
| Heat Resistance | High – excellent under stress | Limited – polymers degrade at high temps |
| Manufacturing | Powder pressed and sintered, then machined | Powder + polymer, injection/compression molded |
| Design Flexibility | Low – needs cutting and coating | High – complex shapes, multi-pole configurations |
| Cost | Expensive – material loss, energy intensive | Lower – one-step, near-net shape |
| Durability | Brittle – chips easily, prone to corrosion | Robust – corrosion-resistant and tough |
Application Breakdown: Where Each Magnet Dominates
Sintered magnets dominate when strength is non-negotiable:
- Electric Vehicles (EVs): Traction motors rely on sintered magnets for torque and efficiency.
- Wind Turbines: Direct-drive generators use sintered magnets to cut maintenance and boost output.
- Defense & Aerospace: From missile guidance to fighter jet actuators, performance trumps all.
- Medical Imaging: MRI systems require stable, ultra-strong magnetic fields.
Bonded magnets shine in precision and mass-market devices:
- Consumer Electronics: Smartphone haptics, earbuds, and disk drives favor molded, compact magnets. Also, think about humanoids and robotics.
- Automotive Sensors: Bonded magnets power ABS systems, seat motors, and wipers.
- Home Appliances: Vacuum cleaners, fans, and power tools integrate bonded magnets for low-cost reliability.
- Office Equipment: Printers and copiers rely on molded shapes and uniform magnetic fields.
China's Grip on the Magnet Market
Here’s the hard truth: China produces over 85% of the world’s rare earth magnets, and the top seven producers are all Chinese. Giants like JL MAG, Ningbo Yunsheng, and ZHmag lead global rankings, each churning out tens of thousands of tonnes annually—mostly sintered magnets for EVs and wind turbines. By comparison, Japan holds a mere 7% of global capacity, and the West lags far behind.
See the Rare Earth Exchanges Magnet Manufacturing Rankings for some perspective. Leading players in America (up and running) include Neo Performance Materials, Permag, and Arnold Magnetic Technologies.
JL MAG alone produced over 20,000 tonnes of magnets in 2024 and plans to triple that by 2027. These companies dominate not just output but entire supply chains, from raw ore to finished magnets. Western firms? They either buy from China or outsource their processing back to it. That dependency is now sparking alarm bells in Washington, Brussels, and Tokyo.
Bonded’s Smaller but Crucial Market
Bonded magnet production is more fragmented. Magnequench, a North American pioneer spun out from General Motors, helped commercialize bonded NdFeB in the '80s. Today, it operates under Neo Performance Materials (opens in a new tab), supplying powder to makers worldwide.
REEx is monitoring Neo Performance Materials with interest. U.S. firms like Arnold Magnetic Technologies and Japan’s TDK produce bonded magnets for automotive and electronics markets. But compared to sintered output, bonded remains a niche—important, but not dominant.
The West Fights Back: New Entrants and National Strategy
Faced with China's dominance, Western governments are throwing money—and urgency—at the problem. The U.S. Department of Defense now requires all military contractors to stop using Chinese magnets by 2027. That’s accelerated investment in homegrown alternatives.
MP Materials (USA)
Once just a rare earth miner, MP is now building a vertically integrated magnet factory in Texas. Backed by Apple and General Motors, the plant aims to produce 10,000 tonnes/year of sintered magnets.
Noveon Magnetics (USA)
A quietly scaled private firm already making ~2,000 tonnes/year, with plans to hit 10,000. They’re a favorite for federal contracts and defense sourcing.
Vulcan Elements (USA)
The newest disruptor. In 2025, it secured a $620 million DoD loan and a CHIPS Act grant to build a 10,000 tpa magnet facility. Partnered with Energy Fuels and ReElement, Vulcan is poised to launch the first fully domestic “mine-to-magnet” pipeline in decades.
Meanwhile, Canada’s Neo Performance is rebooting plants in Estonia and Thailand. VAC (Germany) and Shin-Etsu (Japan) are eyeing U.S. expansions. It’s a scramble—but success is far from guaranteed.
The Road Ahead: Reinvention or Dependence?
The rare earth magnet sector is nearing a breaking point. Global EV demand is surging. Wind power is scaling fast. Military and consumer technologies are magnet-hungry. Yet nearly all roads still lead through China.
President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill could be cutting the legs out from under America’s future rare earth magnet demand by dismantling the very policies that guaranteed long-term growth in EVs, wind turbines, and high-efficiency electrification.
By eliminating EV sales mandates, rolling back tax credits, and stripping away clean-energy subsidies, the bill removes the demand signals that were set to drive massive domestic consumption of sintered NdFeB magnets—the core component of traction motors, direct-drive wind generators, industrial automation, and grid-modernization technologies.
EV incentives alone were projected to anchor tens of thousands of tonnes of annual U.S. magnet demand over the next decade. Without them, adoption slows, project pipelines shrink, and manufacturers scale back electrified platforms. In effect, America now risks building a rare earth supply chain without the downstream pull to sustain it—a supply-side strategy with no matching demand curve, leaving domestic magnet makers and refiners potentially underutilized while China maintains global pricing power.
Conclusion
Regardless, sintered magnets will continue to dominate the high-performance segment. Bonded magnets will thrive in smart, compact, and affordable designs. And some companies on the radar to make magnets may think of sintering when they actually need bonding. Note that reshoring magnet production is hard. It takes not just capital, but decades of materials science, engineering skill, and ecosystem development. As one industry insider put it, “You can’t just order a magnet factory on Amazon.”
The question now isn’t whether the world needs magnets—it’s whether it can make them at scale without China.
Nice summary. I’ve been struggling to make the math work on the market numbers. I hope you can help.
You quote 385,000 tonnes per year as the 2025 global demand (other estimates are 250,000-350,000 tonnes – so in the same ballpark). The place I get hung up is US demand for magnets at 10,000 tonnes per year. That’s 2.9% of the worldwide total. That doesn’t make sense to me given that magnets go into such a wide variety of industrial and consumer products and the US represents 17% of global industrial production (so we must me making stuff that contains magnets), and the US represents 26% of global GDP (so we must be buying things that contain magnets).
If I simply take the global magnet demand volume times US share of industrial production and of GDP I get between 65,000 tonnes and 100,000 tonnes for actual magnet consumption from all sources.
The forecast demand growth rates are 5-9% per year so by 2035 you’re taking about 100,000-150,000 tonnes of magnets used in production and 160,000-240,000 tonnes of demand for magnets built into end products.
As a quick check, there are ~12 million vehicles built in the US. The audio systems use maybe 0.5 kg of rare earth magnets. That’s 6,000 tonnes just for automotive speakers. So it seems unlikely that 10,000 is a realistic number across all application segments.
I think what may be going on is that the 10,000 number is just for finished magnet blocks, and not counting magnetic assemblies or components (like speakers or electric motors or magnetic sensors). Many of the sub-components are built in other countries (including China). But the recent Chinese licensing restrictions included assemblies and components so the US remains vulnerable here as well. In fact, China’s strategy has long been to use their magnet monopoly to forward integrate up supply chains.
An assembly line is just as vulnerable if it can’t get electric motors or audio transducers or other components as if it can’t get magnets. So it seems like the challenge is 10-20 times bigger than we’ve been talking about.
I’d be interested in your thoughts.