Vietnam’s Ministry of Industry and Trade suggested that rare earth minerals stay off the list of minerals permitted for export in the current period, without details of the length of the “current period.”
The proposal is part of a draft for the Prime Minister’s decision on strategic and critical minerals export and processing.
Rare earths sit apart from most minerals in the draft. They are classed as a special strategic mineral under a dedicated management regime, and existing rules already bar the export of rare earth minerals that fail to meet the ministry’s deep-processing standards.
Even deeply processed rare earth products may be exported only if they appear on the Prime Minister’s list. Meeting a processing standard does not by itself grant a right to export.
The key reason is that the domestic value chain is not yet in place. The draft finds that the full supply chain — mining, ore dressing, hydrometallurgy, and separation into individual products — has not stabilized at commercial industrial scale.
Besides, the domestic capacity to make high-purity separated rare earth oxides, metals, alloys, and magnet materials lags behind the country’s resource potential.
Vietnam’s rare earth resources are 19.82 million tonnes of TR₂O₃, concentrated in the northwest, especially in Lai Chau and Lao Cai provinces.
Rare earths can still make the export list
The draft states that no domestically mined rare earth product is proposed for the export list now, but that policy will be reconsidered in subsequent periods once the deep-processing chain matures and the identification standards are finalized.
Any future export of rare earth products would still have to satisfy both conditions in current law simultaneously: meeting the ministry’s deep-processing standard and being placed on the Prime Minister’s list.
Rare earths are essential to production of permanent magnets, wind power, electric vehicles, electronics, robotics, new materials, semiconductors, high technology, and defense.
A rare earth processing link in Vietnam
U.S. magnet maker Evolution Metals & Technologies Corp. signed an agreement in May 2026 with Senri Trading Co., Ltd. to buy bulk NdPr (neodymium–praseodymium) metal supplied by SRE Vietnam (SRE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan’s Tokai Trading.
Tokai has traded rare earths and rare metals since 1981 and began investing in SRE in 2008. As of January 2025, SRE started tripling its midstream rare earth processing capacity to about 3,929 tonnes per year.
Evolution Metals & Technologies took delivery of a first shipment of about 4 tons of NdPr metal in July 2026. The company said this is the first stage of a deal to scale deliveries as the company lifts magnet production toward roughly 10,000 tons per year by late 2026.
The disclosure stresses that the NdPr is sourced outside China, helping meet U.S. defense supply-chain rules that bar Chinese-origin rare earth magnets.
Evolution Metals & Technologies did not reply to TNGlobal‘s enquiry about the topic.