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

Posted on February 21st, 2025 | Filed under Press Releases

Exiger’s AI Analyzed 10B+ Supply Chain Records, Pinpoints 20K+ Direct Purchases of Restricted Minerals in the Past Year

WASHINGTON, Feb. 21, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Exiger, the market-leading supply chain AI company, today 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.

Exiger continues to forecast and analyze the impact of China’s restrictions on customers using advanced AI and cognitive computing. More information on Exiger’s analysis is available here.

About Exiger
Exiger is revolutionizing the way corporations, government agencies and banks navigate risk and compliance in their third-parties, supply chains and customers through its software and tech-enabled solutions. Exiger’s mission is to make the world a safer and more transparent place to succeed. Empowering its 550 customers across the globe, including 150 in the Fortune 500 and over 55 organizations across the Defense Industrial Base and government agencies, with award-winning AI technology, Exiger leads the way in ESG, cyber, financial crime, third-party and supply chain management and recently achieved FedRAMP® Moderate Authorization.

Named one of Fast Company’s 2023 ‘Brands That Matter’ and recipient of the Third Party Risk Association’s 2024 Innovator Award, Exiger’s work has been recognized by 50+ AI, RegTech and Supply Chain partner awards.

Learn more at www.exiger.com and follow Exiger on LinkedIn.

For more information, please contact:
Kody Gurfein
Chief Marketing Officer
1.914.393.0398
[email protected]