On 4 April 2025 China's Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs issued Announcement No. 18, putting seven medium and heavy rare earth elements under export licensing: samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium, together with the alloys and magnets that contain them (Holland & Knight, 4 April 2025). More than a year on, those controls are still fully in force as of May 2026. Coverage of them fixes on defence and electric vehicles. The same licence sits inside far more ordinary products. The European Parliament's own briefing is blunt about the exposure: the EU imports 98% of its rare-earth magnets from China, and more than 80% of large European firms sit within three intermediaries of a Chinese rare-earth producer (European Parliament, November 2025). If you import anything with a motor or a high-strength magnet in it, that licence regime is already inside your order.
What China actually put under licence
Announcement No. 18 stops short of a ban. It requires the Chinese exporter to win a per-shipment licence from MOFCOM before the goods can leave the country. Two elements on the list do most of the damage to consumer-goods buyers: terbium and dysprosium. They are the additives that let a neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnet keep its strength when it gets hot, which is exactly what a brushless motor in an e-bike, a cordless power tool, a hair-styling device or a cooling fan relies on. Samarium-cobalt magnets are caught as well. The control also reaches outside China's borders. A magnet made anywhere can still need Chinese sign-off if it holds more than a 0.1% trace of Chinese-origin controlled material or was produced using Chinese processing technology. For most consumer supply chains that trace is always present, because China refines roughly 90% of the world's rare earths.
Why it lands on a buyer who never ordered a magnet
You order finished goods. A Bluetooth speaker, an e-bike hub motor, a handheld beauty device, a desk fan. Dysprosium never shows up on a purchase order. But the factory you buy from buys its magnets from a sub-supplier, and that sub-supplier needs an export licence cleared before the magnets reach the assembly line. When the licence stalls, your production date slides, and the factory tends to tell you late, dressed up as a vague "material delay." By November 2025, Reuters reported that only a little over half of roughly 2,000 export-licence applications filed by EU firms had been approved, with many sitting 60 to 120 days or longer (Reuters, November 2025). China issued a first batch of streamlined "general licences" on 2 December 2025 to three large magnet makers, JL Mag, Ningbo Yunsheng and Beijing Zhong Ke San Huan, which lets one supplier ship to named customers without re-applying each time (Reuters, 2 December 2025). That helps whoever buys from those three. It does not retire the licensing system, and the second, broader wave of controls from October 2025 is only suspended until November 2026.
What to ask before you wire the deposit
Put the magnet on your bill of materials as a named part, then get three things on the record before money moves. Ask the factory which company supplies the magnets and whether the grade contains dysprosium or terbium, because that single answer decides whether Announcement No. 18 touches your order at all. Ask whether that magnet supplier already holds a current export licence or ships under a general licence, and write the answer into your contract with a dated delivery commitment attached. Then add a licence buffer to your timeline instead of trusting the factory's headline lead time, because the approval window is the one stretch of the schedule neither of you controls. This is the point where checking the real supply chain behind your invoice turns into money. Our guide to verifying a Chinese supplier covers how to trace a sub-supplier you have never spoken to.
Where Mila Sourcing fits
A magnet delay stays invisible until it becomes your delay, and it stays invisible because the buyer can only see the assembler, never the factory two steps behind it. A Mila agent maps that chain on the ground before any deposit moves: which company builds the motor, which one supplies its magnets, and whether those magnets are waiting on a MOFCOM licence, all written into a bilingual contract with the dates attached. Full Production Management runs the whole order on that footing. If you are earlier in the process, our guides to supplier sourcing in China and finding reliable suppliers in China cover the steps before the magnet question arrives.
Sources: Holland & Knight, China imposes export controls on medium and heavy rare earth materials (MOFCOM & GACC Announcement No. 18), 4 April 2025; European Parliament Research Service, China's rare-earth export restrictions, November 2025; Reuters via MINING.COM, China issues first batch of streamlined rare-earth licences, 2 December 2025; Reuters via Investing.com, China rare-earth magnet export licence approvals, November 2025.