Highlights
- Baotou hosted a Science and Technology Innovation Salon to deliver collectively native uncommon earth firms and Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers.
- The purpose was to speed up innovation in high-performance everlasting magnets and clever manufacturing.
- Multiple preliminary cooperation agreements had been reached between Baotou producers and CAS analysis groups.
- The agreements intention at transferring cutting-edge magnet expertise from laboratories to factory-scale manufacturing.
- The initiative demonstrates China’s institutional coordination to tighten management over uncommon earth magnet provide chains.
- It seeks to shorten the trail from analysis to industrial dominance in a sector the place Western nations stay structurally dependent.
China’s uncommon earth capital, Baotou, has kicked off 2026 by strengthening ties between native magnet producers and a number one Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) supplies institute. The purpose: speed up innovation in high-performance everlasting magnets and transfer cutting-edge lab analysis into factory-scale manufacturing. For international markets, this alerts China’s continued push to lock in technological—not simply useful resource—benefit throughout the uncommon earth magnet provide chain.
China’s Inner Mongolia metropolis of Baotou hosted its first “Science and Technology Innovation Salon” of 2026 on January 27–28, focusing squarely on uncommon earths. The occasion introduced collectively native uncommon earth firms and specialists from the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, one in every of China’s main analysis hubs for magnetic supplies.
Organized by the Baotou Science and Technology Bureau, the assembly centered on collaborative innovation in high-performance everlasting magnets, clever manufacturing tools for magnet manufacturing, and downstream purposes of NdFeB and associated supplies. Researchers offered current advances in magnet supplies design, sensible manufacturing programs, and utility enlargement—areas immediately related to electrical autos, wind generators, and superior industrial motors.
Yan Aru, Professor, Rare Earth Permanent Magnetic Materials
According to officers, a number of preliminary cooperation intentions had been reached between Baotou-based firms and the CAS analysis group, suggesting future joint R&D tasks and expertise switch efforts. While no industrial contracts had been introduced, the emphasis was on aligning analysis outputs with particular, real-world manufacturing wants of native corporations.
Yan Aru, director of the institute’s Magnetic Materials and Applications Laboratory (opens in a new tab), emphasised that Baotou’s political and monetary help for uncommon earths is “stronger than ever,” and mentioned the institute will now pursue personalized follow-on engagements with particular person firms to speed up commercialization of analysis regionally.
Municipal leaders framed the initiative as a part of Baotou’s broader plan to construct “two rare earth bases”—extensively understood as aworld-class uncommon earth supplies base and a sophisticated uncommon earthapplications base—whereas modernizing town’s legacy heavy-industry economic system by inexperienced and high-tech transformation. Rare Earth Exchanges™ has elucidated the implications of this mandate in lots of articles.
For Western observers, the importance lies much less in any single breakthrough and extra within the institutional coordination on show: China is tightly coupling state-backed analysis institutes, native governments, and producers to shorten the trail from laboratory innovation to industrial dominance in uncommon earth magnets—a sector the place the U.S. and Europe stay structurally dependent.
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