Material Empire

Qin Hai's identity became the last straw that crushed all mine owners' doubts. It has to be said that this straw is made of gold after all, and it weighs a lot.

The next thing becomes very simple. No one would doubt Qin Hai's sincerity anymore. Just kidding, someone with an imposing giant boss who earns tens of thousands of dollars every minute, would come here to play tricks with them without any trouble? The combined property of the people in this room is probably not as large as that of a company under the Daqin Group. Do they need to lie to you people?

Since it is not cheating money, then we can only believe Qin Hai's explanation that he is here to give everyone the opportunity to make money. Can an industry wizard like Mr. Qin have a bad investment vision? Since Mr. Qin said that these factories can make money, there will definitely be a lot of money in the future. Boss Qin has sent the mechanism to his own nose, if everyone catches it quickly, he will be the number one fool in the sky, and he is only worthy of going to the detention center to keep company with unlucky bastards like Xin Jinlong.

Rare earth refinery, rare earth glaze factory, rare earth catalyst factory... the letter of intent for the shareholding of each factory is being scrambled by mine owners. The investment of each factory ranges from tens of millions to hundreds of thousands. Regardless of whether it is a large or small factory, Daqin Group controls 51% of the shares, and only allocates the other 49% to the mine owners in Johor Bahru.

The mine owners have absolutely no opinion on such an equity distribution plan. One is because no one has the ability to bear so much investment alone, and the other is that it is safer to let Daqin Group as the major shareholder. People understand technology, understand the market, and have the central leadership as their backer. Isn't this a natural characteristic of a controlling shareholder? There is nothing wrong with letting the Daqin Group eat meat and drinking some soup for yourself. If the future described by Qin Hai is true, then this soup is much more nutritious than the dry steamed buns everyone used to eat.

These technologies for the deep processing of rare earths all come from the Anhe Institute of Materials, and this is what Qin Hai started planning more than a year ago. Simply selling rare earths has no future, and only deep processing can give full play to the advantages of a rare earth power. China's proven rare earth reserves account for about 1/3 of the world's total, and it has no monopoly. However, China’s rare earths have two major characteristics that are incomparable to foreign rare earths. One is that the production cost of light rare earths is extremely low, and the other is that the variety of heavy rare earths is very complete. Having these two is enough for China to call itself a rare earth power.

What Qin Hai wanted from Ji Mingchu was the monopoly right to operate rare earths. In fact, he robbed the jobs of the three major foreign trade companies. Of course, the three major foreign trade companies will not argue with Qin Hai because of this matter, because the export of rare earths is only a small part compared with the export of copper ore, tungsten ore, tin ore, etc., and management is very difficult. The big foreign trade company didn't mind giving up the leftovers to Qin Hai.

Qin Hai, who got the exclusive operating right, did not eat alone, but extensively absorbed local governments and small mine owners in rare earth producing areas to participate in the development. The purpose of his doing this is to leave room for others to keep the safety of the rare earth industry in line with the principle that the strong dragon does not overwhelm the local snake. Otherwise, once there is public outrage, all kinds of local constraints will be enough to make his rare earth companies overwhelmed.

In the second aspect, he also hopes to give Ji Mingchu and the top leaders of the central government a sense of understanding the general situation and taking into account the overall situation, which will be helpful for his future development. Most of the rare earth producing areas are poor mountainous areas, and rare earth is the best hope for local poverty alleviation. If he takes away all the profits and keeps the local area in poverty for a long time, the country will definitely have an idea. Instead of waiting for the country to come forward to ask him for profits, it is better to make a gesture first and win a good reputation.

In addition to the plan for building a factory, Qin Hai also presented a proposal for reclamation of mines and tailings sites. Barren hills and tailing sand fields obviously cannot be used as farmland. The main method of reclamation is to plant trees and grass, and obtain certain economic benefits while restoring vegetation. Before coming to Yunjiang Province, Qin Hai had visited the experts of the National Institute of Botany and learned that trees including masson pine, neem, Schima superba, and Nanling Dalbergia can be planted on rare earth tailings, as well as golden foxtail, Herbs such as crabgrass and broadleaf paspalum.

Wasteland reclamation is basically a matter of losing money, unless it lasts for a certain period of time, and the vegetation is fully restored, there will be some benefits from trees, and these benefits are insignificant compared with the initial investment. Logically speaking, it is difficult to find someone willing to join in this kind of thing, but Qin Hai still passed the plan to each mine owner.

What made him feel gratified was that most of the mine owners expressed that they were willing to spend 350,000 yuan for reclamation, and more than 200 people got together to get close to 10 million yuan. Everyone said that they were willing to pay some money to make up for their past mistakes, but what most people thought was to spend money to buy popularity, so that Qin Hai, Jia Xiaodong and others could have a good opinion of themselves. Of course, after spending this money, I can confidently say that I have made contributions to the environment of my hometown on various occasions, and this money is not spent wrongly.

Under Qin Hai's stick-and-carrot policy, the vigorous southern rare earth rectification campaign has achieved fruitful results. Thousands of unlicensed small mining sites were basically shut down, and the licensed mining sites were also brought under Qin Hai's unified management and began to be rectified.

Qin Hai's big moves were limited to the south, but did not touch the north. Northern China is a light rare earth producing area, mainly producing products such as lanthanum and cerium. Among them, the Baiyun mining area can mine 15 million tons of ore containing rare earth and iron a year, and the rare earth contained in it reaches 600,000 tons. Such a large production capacity and extremely low mining cost make the price of light rare earth in China much lower than that in the United States, Turkey, Brazil and other places. Qin Hai left these light rare earth production capacity in order to suppress foreign rare earth companies, making it impossible for them to resume production.

The impact of the rare earth rectification in the South quickly spread to the international rare earth market. Compared with the slight rise in the price of light rare earths, the price of heavy rare earths can be said to be on a rocket, quadrupling within a month, and from the supply and demand situation. Look, the future price will rise infinitely.

"The quotation of dysprosium oxide in the market has reached 50 US dollars per kilogram, and a year ago, the price was only 5 US dollars. Even after China adopted the policy of limiting production and ensuring prices last year, it only rose to 12 US dollars. But the past few years In just one month, the price has tripled!"

In the conference room of Haruyama Magnetic Materials Co., Ltd., Nagatomo Eiji, the director in charge of raw material procurement, reported market trends to the company's middle and senior managers with a dark face.

"What's the reason?" President Miyagawa asked calmly.

Changyou Yongsi replied: "We have learned that South China, which produces heavy rare earths, is currently undergoing rare earth mining governance. During the governance period, most of the mines were temporarily closed, except for the supply of heavy rare earths to China's military industry. In addition, the supply of heavy rare earths for the civilian sector as well as for export has been disrupted.”

"It's nothing." Miyagawa nodded, "China's rare earth mining is indeed very chaotic, and it is inevitable for the Chinese government to carry out governance. However, they seem to have carried out similar governance several times, and every time Give up halfway. We don't have to worry about the supply of heavy rare earths. If the market price is too high, we can use our own reserves first."

This psychology of Miyagawa is well-founded. In the global mining market, rare earth is a small player. Compared with the annual trading volume of hundreds of millions of tons of iron ore, the production and sales of rare earths are only tens of thousands of tons. Due to the small quantity of supply and demand, the price of rare earths has always been extremely unstable, and any slight disturbance will cause large fluctuations in the price. Miyagawa is convinced that the price increase of rare earths this time is nothing more than a gust of wind.

Japan is a big country in the application of rare earths, but at the same time lacks rare earth resources and is completely dependent on imports. For this reason, Japanese companies have a tradition of storing rare earths, and the national rare earth reserves are equivalent to two years of imports. Their habitual practice is that when the international market price is low, they will buy in large quantities to induce rare earth enterprises to expand their production capacity. When rare earth companies started to raise prices, they stopped importing and used stocks to meet consumption, forcing rare earth companies to cut prices and sell them off.

Such a set of tricks may not be effective against large rare earth companies in the United States, but it has been tried and tested repeatedly for small rare earth companies in China. A lot of experience has shown that as long as Japanese companies pretend to be indifferent, hundreds of small Chinese rare earth exporters will lower prices and rush to hug the Japanese.

Some people may wonder, since the Chinese government has restricted the export rights of rare earths to the three major foreign trade companies, why is there such a situation of mutually lowering prices?

There are two reasons for this. One is that there are dozens of subsidiaries under the three major foreign trade companies, each of which has the right to export, and also has its own foreign exchange earning task requirements. Shopping under the framework of the company.

Another reason is the impact of countless private mining sites. The rare earth products of these private mining sites cannot be included in the sales scope of the three major foreign trade companies, and can only be exported through disguised smuggling. They can falsely call rare earths tungsten sand or copper ore, and sell them abroad through legal channels. The local government is fully aware of this matter, but it pretends to be deaf and dumb. In the final analysis, it is still driven by local interests.

It is precisely because he is well aware of China's rare earth production situation that Miyagawa is so confident that as long as the company's inventory is used for a few months, China's rare earth production restriction policy will collapse, and the price of rare earth will fall back to The average level of Chinese cabbage.