It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
The iron ore trader Radiant World may hold only $10,000 in cash, even though its most recent financial statements refer to cash balances of more than $200 million, lawyers for a Jefferies-linked fund suing Radiant over an alleged fraud said on Thursday.
LAM Trade Finance Group II, in which US bank Jefferies holds a minority stake, obtained a freezing order last month from London’s High Court against Radiant World and its founder Pinkesh Nahar as well as Sapphire Minmetals, which used to be part of the company.
Singapore’s police force last month said it was investigating Radiant World after reports that invoices provided to its banks may not have been valid.
Radiant World, which has denied the allegations, did not reply to a request for comment on Thursday. Sapphire Minmetals did not respond to a request for comment.
LAM Trade Finance Group II, which has also obtained freezing orders in Hong Kong and Singapore, says it purchased iron ore receivables from companies linked to Radiant and/or Sapphire, by which it bought the right to be paid by traders such as Glencore and Vitol.
But those receivables either did not exist or were not validly assigned, it said in its claim against Radiant World.
“It appears that the defendants used debit notes to paper over the cracks, as it is put by the claimant, for as long as they could and it is characterised that ‘the well has now run dry’,” Judge Simon Bryan said when he made the freezing order.
In trading, receivables are amounts of money that a company is owed by its customers for goods that have already been delivered but not yet paid for.
Nahar said in a document submitted by his lawyers for Thursday’s hearing that it was not clear precisely what role he was alleged to have played.
Nahar has indicated his intention to challenge the court’s jurisdiction, said the document, which described the case as “a substantial, complex, $500 million international fraud claim”.
At Thursday’s hearing, lawyers representing LAM Trade Finance Group II argued in court documents that the freezing order should remain in place because of the risk that the defendants would dissipate assets.
They said asset totals provided in a witness statement on behalf of Radiant World were “substantially different” from those in financial statements for the year to September 30, 2025.
“The audited financial statements refer to cash balances of over $200 million whereas (the statement) says that Radiant World holds only $10,000 in cash,” they said.
Radiant World is embroiled in other lawsuits. It has sued Glencore (LON: GLEN) in Singapore seeking more than $2 billion.
Judge Andrew Henshaw said on Thursday that the next London hearing was likely to take place in late December.
(Reporting by Polina Devitt; writing by Sam Tobin; Editing by Louise Heavens)
US battery startup that chose China over Kentucky opens first factory as Trump, Xi meet
A US battery startup that scrapped plans to make Kentucky the site of its first factory has instead built it in China, exposing the limits of President Donald Trump’s efforts to lure manufacturing home just as he welcomes Chinese President Xi Jinping for a summit.
EnerVenue starts mass production at its manufacturing facility in the eastern Chinese city of Changzhou on Thursday, the same day Trump meets Xi in Washington, as relations between the superpowers remain strained by a tariff war the US president launched partly to bring back manufacturing and jobs.
Chief Executive Henning Rath told Reuters the date was a coincidence, and the decision to manufacture in China instead of the US was down to skills and supply chain depth — particularly in Changzhou, which bills itself as China’s “new energy capital.”
“The secret sauce is this industrial cluster,” Rath said, citing the density of hydraulics, pneumatics and automation specialists, along with engineers able to iterate quickly on what he called a “first-of-its-kind” line.
Without building in China, Rath said, it would be “very difficult with the capital available” to prove the manufacturing process at a commercial scale.
EnerVenue’s choice exposes how Trump’s offer of lower taxes, easier permitting and other incentives may not be enough to overcome the advantages offered by places like China, even in a sector viewed as critical to US energy security and supply-chain resilience.
When Rath joined the company in April, he made building in China a precondition for taking the job.
Lower costs, deeper expertise
A floor manager at the Changzhou plant said local suppliers often develop equipment without payment until a design is adopted, unlike foreign vendors that tend to ask for money upfront.
Graduate engineers earn about 12,000 yuan ($1,792) a month, well below US salaries, he added.
EnerVenue, which has R&D in Fremont, California, and was founded by Stanford materials science professor Yi Cui, makes nickel-hydrogen batteries derived from technology NASA used in the Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station.
It announced a Kentucky factory plan in 2023 with a first phase costing $264 million and creating 450 jobs, but abandoned it a year later.
Rath, speaking as engineers tested spinning hydraulic arms and lidar-guided robots ferried materials between production stations, said the attempted project was a “valuable learning experience,” but the technology wasn’t yet ready.
EnerVenue went on to redesign both the battery and the factory.
Expansion plans
Rath declined to disclose the cost of the Changzhou facility, which is around 95% automated and will employ about 400 workers by the end of the year, but gave a $20 million to $50 million range. Government support was limited to permitting, certification and site selection, he said.
EnerVenue raised more than $300 million in a March funding round led by Full Vision Capital, the family office of Hong Kong property heir Peter Lee Ka-kit, whose broader group includes customer Towngas, Rath said, with other investors including Saudi Aramco and SLB.
The company aims to reach annual capacity of 250 megawatt hours this year, equal to about 300 battery cells a day, rising to 1 gigawatt hours by the third quarter of 2027.
It’s unclear whether China-made cells will qualify for US clean energy tax credits, which Trump’s 2025 tax law kept for battery storage while adding restrictions on Chinese content and ownership.
“We are an American company with a Chinese footprint,” Rath said.
EnerVenue plans to open similar factories in North America, the Middle East and Europe from 2028, with sites to be chosen next year, said Rath.
But he stressed that China is the “factory of factories” and “an important stepping stone” towards global production.
Asked whether EnerVenue would open a US plant, Rath said, “We want to play in the North American market. It depends a little bit now on legislation and regulation.”
($1 = 6.6955 Chinese yuan)
(Editing by Marius Zaharia and Kevin Buckland)
China rare earth exports to US drop before Xi-Trump meet
US President Donald J. Trump meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in China on May 14, 2026. Credit: The White House | X
China’s exports of rare-earth magnets to the US fell last month, underscoring concerns in the Trump administration that Beijing is still squeezing flows of the critical minerals despite last year’s trade truce.
Shipments of magnets to the US dropped 21% in August to 512 tons from the month before, according to Chinese customs data released on Sunday. The industrial components — along with other types of rare-earth products — became Beijing’s greatest point of leverage over Washington in trade negotiations last year.
President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are due to meet in the US capital on Thursday to flesh out their approach to topics ranging from trade to artificial intelligence. Ahead of that, top US negotiators signaled rare earth flows were a sticking point and may mean that the truce — which expires November — may be extended only by three to six months.
“I think a lot of it is because China has created this uncertainty,” US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in a Monday interview with Bloomberg Television after talks in New York with his Chinese counterparts. “They have limited rare earths exports. They control them, we monitor them, and I think just saying we have full confidence and trust with each other at this point is a little naive.”
China imposed controls on exports of rare-earth magnets — used in everything from cars to consumer goods and weaponry — in April 2025, although they were subsequently eased. The industry is keenly waiting for the outcome of the Xi-Trump talks as they come before the expiration of a US-China trade truce, which includes commitments by Beijing to maintain flows of critical minerals by issuing more generous export licenses.
China hopes to offer more licenses for rare earth exports as a bargaining chip in talks, people with familiar with the matter said, without disclosing what Beijing would demand in return.
“Washington needs stability with Beijing to keep these critical inputs moving,” Chris Kennedy, lead for economic statecraft at Bloomberg Economics, said in a note. “Yet periods of calm that restore access to lower-cost Chinese material weaken the urgency for the US to break its dependence on China.”
Shipments slumped in May last year, but quickly recovered. They’re running at an average of about 504 tons a month this year, although that’s still below 621 tons in 2024 before the curbs. Chinese customs data shows that direct exports of rare earths including yttrium, dysprosium and terbium — subject to export controls — have also dropped compared with previous years.
In May, Greer gave Beijing a “passing grade” for its performance in keeping flows of critical minerals going. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in July that China should “fully meet its commitments.” Bessent and China’s Vice Premier He Lifeng are holding talks in New York ahead of the leaders’ meeting.
Beijing Tightens Rare Earth Flow Ahead Of Washington Summit With Trump
China's rare earth shipments to the US fell 21% in August to 512 tons, new customs data show, days before Trump and Xi sit down in Washington.
Trump and Xi meet Thursday, with rare earths, tariffs and AI safety on the table after Bessent and He Lifeng held preliminary talks.
Barclays says Beijing will control global critical mineral mining and refining through at least 2030, keeping the leverage in China's hands.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump are scheduled to meet in Washington on Thursday. UBS analysts quoted chief China economist Yu Song as saying the meeting between the leaders of the two global superpowers is largely about strategic stability and modest progress on tariffs, rare earths, and AI safety.
Political risk analyst Marcus Bischoff expects no major breakthrough but says the most realistic outcome is continuity in US-China relations as the most likely outcome. He sees cautious grounds for higher expectations following discussions between US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng ahead of the Trump-Xi summit.
Over the weekend, a Reuters report said that Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng were set to discuss advanced AI bots and the global adoption of the technology, as well as rare earths.
As Christian Keller, Barclays' global head of economics research, recently described, China's near-total control of more than 95% of critical material refining has been used as leverage against the US. Whether magnets, tungsten, germanium, gallium, or other critical materials, China has restricted their flows over the last year and a half, forcing the US into a mad sprint to secure conflict-free supplies.
Bloomberg reported the latest details on China's resource nationalism and the weaponization of critical material supply chains overnight, citing customs data released Sunday that showed rare earth shipments from China to the US plunged sharply in August.
Shipments dropped 21% from July to 512 tons, according to the new trade data. The decline leaves US supplies of components used in cars, consumer goods, and weapons as a key talking point, whether in discussions between Bessent and his Chinese counterparts or between Trump and Xi.
Bloomberg Economics' Chris Kennedy said, "Washington needs stability with Beijing to keep these critical inputs moving," adding, "Yet periods of calm that restore access to lower-cost Chinese material weaken the urgency for the US to break its dependence on China."
The latest trade data shows China's quasi-monopolistic control of critical materials can be used as geopolitical leverage.
One major problem for the US is that Barclays' Keller shows Beijing will control mineral mining and global refining of these materials through at least 2030.
Breaking Beijing's quasi-monopolistic grip has been an emerging theme of ours that includes finding producing miners with conflict-free supply chains that can deliver to the West. Those miners will be the early winners because these critical materials are the building blocks of the West's pursuit of reindustrialization, the AI data center buildout, power grid upgrades, and, of course, the incoming rearmament cycle.
Baotou City: Epicentre of China’s rare earth industry. Image by Matthew Stinson Creative Commons CC BY-NC 2.0
Baotou, an industrial city near the Gobi Desert, is the Silicon Valley of rare earths. Off Rare Earth Street, research institutes sit alongside a museum devoted to the minerals. Nearby, JL Mag Rare Earth Co., the world’s top maker of high-performance magnets, is building its largest plant yet — an expansion that offers a glimpse of how China plans to defend its commanding position in the supply chain.
Over the past year, the US and its allies have pledged billions of dollars to develop new sources of rare earths outside China. Indispensable to everything from missiles to electric vehicles, the minerals are a potent source of Beijing’s economic leverage. As President Xi Jinping arrives in Washington this week, rare earths are at the top of the trade agenda, with China weighing whether to expand export curbs this fall.
But as the US and others attempt to replicate China’s supply chain, Beijing is trying to redefine it. The country already dominates magnet production, and companies like JL Mag are now expanding into increasingly sophisticated components that incorporate them.
That creates a moving target. Mining rare earths is only the first step. The minerals must be separated and refined, turned into high-performance magnets and then manufactured into usable parts. Even if countries outside China secure enough dysprosium or terbium from new mines in places like Brazil, for example, they could still depend on Chinese companies — and their technology, patents and manufacturing scale — to supply fast-growing industries like robotics.
China’s rare earth magnet exports to the US fell last month, and Beijing hopes to offer additional export licenses as a bargaining chip at the summit, Bloomberg News reported.
JL Mag is Exhibit A. Just a few years ago, the company was best known for making rare earth magnets for air conditioners and wind turbines. Today, it has more than 10 times the current production capacity of its closest US competitor and has emerged as a major supplier to the EV industry, with analysts linking it to customers including Tesla Inc. and Volkswagen.
A review of JL Mag’s corporate filings and interviews with magnet makers in Asia and North America, as well as those familiar with the company’s operations, found that the scale and scope of its expansion far eclipse the nascent projects underway in the West. Little known outside the industry, the company is extending its reach from Baotou to as far away as Monterrey, Mexico, where it wants to shift some processing closer to US clients.
“JL Mag can meet the needs of its customers in a way that US competitors just can’t,” said David Abraham, principal at Materium Strata, a critical minerals advisory and market intelligence firm. “Customers can just give them their specs, and JL Mag basically presses a few buttons on their machines and out comes the product. Catching up to that is incredibly hard.”
Estimates put JL Mag’s share of the global rare earth magnet market at 10% to 20%, with its products used across the world’s top 10 new-energy vehicle brands. By 2028, it plans to add as much as 20,000 tons of annual capacity in Baotou, a 50% increase that would extend its lead in an industry where its three closest rivals are also Chinese.
The expansion is already visible. JL Mag’s Baotou site sits on the block next to Rare Earth Park, where Chinese scientists are carved into a granite wall and stainless-steel cubes embossed with chemical symbols dot the flower beds. At the factory, a recruitment flyer hangs on the front gate. The plant takes more than half an hour to walk around.
Robotics shows where JL Mag wants to go next. Last year, the company launched a business unit dedicated to humanoid robots that reports directly to its chief executive, with plans to expand its presence in the sector. Daiwa Securities has identified the firm as the sole supplier of motor rotors for Tesla’s Optimus robots. Another analyst estimates that JL Mag supplies about 80% of the magnets used in Tesla vehicles.
“They came out of nowhere,” said Constantine Karayannopoulos, the former chief executive officer of Neo Performance Materials Inc., which also operates a magnet plant in China. “To me, there is JL and then there is everybody else. They are a juggernaut. They can take business at any price.”
JL Mag referred questions about its operations and expansion plans to its exchange filings.
The company has long been on Beijing’s radar. In May 2019, Xi stopped at some of JL Mag’s facilities in southern China, touring production lines and inspecting the furnaces used to make rare earth magnets. The visit was celebrated in state media and JL Mag’s publications. To remain “undefeated in fierce competition,” Xi said, according to state media, “we must firmly grasp technological innovation as a strategic foundation.” China’s top trade negotiator, Liu He, stood at his side.
The timing and choice of venue were provocative then and prescient in hindsight. Just 10 days earlier, US President Donald Trump had hiked tariffs on Chinese goods, escalating a trade war that would punctuate his first term in office.
It would take until last year — just after Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs — for Xi to pull the trigger. China imposed export controls on rare earths, choking off supplies and threatening swaths of US manufacturing before helping force a trade truce with Washington.
Yet JL Mag has been largely unfazed. US efforts to diversify rare earth flows still face “numerous challenges,” the company said in its latest annual report. Chinese magnet makers will remain the “dominant players.”
In 2024, China accounted for about 94% of global rare earth permanent magnet manufacturing — far exceeding its share of mining — according to the International Energy Agency. That same year, JL Mag says it became the world’s largest magnet producer by both output and sales. Between Xi’s visit in 2019 and 2025, the company’s annual capacity more than quadrupled, according to its historical reports. By next year, it wants to boost that by another 50%, to 60,000 tons.
That advantage is reinforced by clusters like Baotou, where processors, magnet makers and research institutes sit just a few hours by train from the giant Bayan Obo mine. The proximity cuts logistics costs and makes it easier to share suppliers, recruit specialized workers and tap decades of expertise.
By comparison, MP Materials Corp., which operates the only rare earth mine and processing facility in the US, started producing rare earths magnets from its plant in Fort Worth, Texas, last year. After the Trump administration invested $400 million in the company, for a roughly 15% equity stake, MP unveiled plans to spend more than $1.25 billion on a much bigger magnet-making plant in Northlake, Texas, that would eventually bring its production to about 10,000 tons a year.
That expansion would equal about a third of JL Mag’s production in 2025, without factoring in the Chinese firm’s plans to expand.
Other US companies have made similar pledges to build magnet facilities but have little experience and capital to show for it.
Demand, meanwhile, is surging, benefiting JL Mag and Chinese rivals such as Ningbo Yunsheng Co. Ltd. Consumption of rare earths used in permanent magnets has doubled since 2015 and is projected to rise another third by 2030, according to the IEA. Outside China, demand is expected to climb 50% by 2035, with existing and planned magnet projects meeting less than a fifth of it.
“The Western companies are still developing their technology, doing everything from scratch,” said Derek Zhang, a Daiwa Securities analyst. “The Chinese companies can ramp up capacity very easily and the cost is maybe about 1/10th.”
JL Mag was founded by industry outsiders. Two decades ago, Cai Baogui was hunting for his next business opportunity. He grew up in Jiangxi province, the southern heartland of China’s rare earths sector, but had spent his career elsewhere — first as a university lecturer and later as a senior executive overseeing plastics manufacturing operations in Dongguan.
Renewable energy caught his attention after he met the chairman of emerging wind-turbine maker Goldwind, according to a rare interview Cai gave to a Chinese news outlet in 2020. Soon after, he teamed up with two friends, Hu Zhibin and Li Xinnong, to explore making rare earth magnets needed for such machines.
In 2008, the trio launched JL Mag by uniting opposite ends of the supply chain. Ganzhou Rare Earth provided a link to raw materials, while Goldwind became an important early customer. The idea was to move beyond the mining, separation and smelting that dominated the city of Ganzhou’s rare earth industry and capture more value by turning those resources into the magnets that make technologies actually work. JL Mag’s founding philosophy, Cai said, was “long-termism.”
Success was hardly assured. Rare earth prices surged more than tenfold in a matter of months in 2011 before collapsing, according to Cai, who remains the firm’s chief executive officer. If raw materials became too expensive, he said, it would be like having “flour more expensive than bread.”
By 2013 and 2014, Cai recalled, employees were leaving and he faced a choice over whether to abandon the industry.
But by the time Xi visited in 2019 — a moment Cai said “greatly boosted our confidence” — JL Mag had emerged from the downturn with a growing business supplying magnets for wind turbines, ACs and EVs. It had also gone public in Shenzhen the previous year.
Four years later, JL Mag raised about HK$4.2 billion ($540 million) in Hong Kong, giving it access to more capital as it embarked on a massive expansion.
In the years since, government support has accompanied JL Mag’s rapid expansion. The company received tens of millions of dollars in subsidies recognized over the past three years, while local authorities have repeatedly designated its factories as major projects.
Some describe JL Mag as unusually well-positioned to weather even the stormiest stretches in relations with Washington. When Beijing’s rare earth controls disrupted manufacturers abroad last year, JL Mag was among the first Chinese companies granted a general export license. Its US sales revenue rose 40%.
The firm has for years been one of the government’s “favorite sons,” said John Ebert, the longtime US representative for magnet producer Ningbo Yunsheng, which he left this year. “That’s why JL Mag grew so quickly from almost nothing into something.”
For potentially huge new markets like robotics, the company is going all-in.
JL Mag named humanoid robots as its next major growth pillar in its latest annual report. Their joints rely on magnet-powered motors that effectively act as muscles, allowing for precise, agile movement. JL Mag is pushing beyond simply supplying these magnets to making finished components, adding another layer of the supply chain for Western competitors to replicate.
“Moving forward the company will continue to increase its investment in research and development of magnetic components for humanoid robots,” JL Mag said.
China is already an early leader in humanoid robotics, accounting for 97% of global shipments in the first half of 2026, according to one survey.
The potential is substantial. Nomura says humanoids use significantly more rare earth material per motor than EVs. JL Mag expects China to remain dominant, telling Citigroup analysts it will likely still produce 80% of the world’s magnets in 2030.
“Even if Western projects materialize, management believes they may solve the ‘availability’ issue, but are unlikely to compete with China on costs, scale, quality and customization,” Citigroup said in a February report, summarizing JL Mag’s views.
That helps explain another US strategy for reducing China’s leverage: eliminating rare earths from magnets altogether.
Niron Magnetics, a Minnesota-based manufacturer, is pursuing that approach with magnets made from iron and nitrogen. The Pentagon is backing the company as it develops factories capable of eventually producing as much as 11,500 tons annually. Looming restrictions are also helping create a market for alternatives: Starting Jan. 1, the Pentagon will stop procuring certain defense technology containing Chinese rare earth magnets.
But the economics remain daunting. Niron has seen a “massive” influx of inquiries from prospective defense customers ahead of the deadline, said Tom Grainger, its vice president of commercial and corporate development. Demand has already overwhelmed the relatively small company — before it has even begun targeting robotics.
“If you take major economic buckets like labor, or government support, you just can’t compete with China,” Grainger said.
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Climate-driven atmospheric circulation fuels dangerous heat-PM2.5 extremes over India
Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
As global warming intensifies, extreme heat events are becoming more frequent and severe worldwide, and are increasingly occurring alongside air pollution to form compound heatwave–air pollution events. Because simultaneous exposure to extreme heat and polluted air poses substantially greater health risks than either hazard alone, these compound events have emerged as a growing global environmental concern.
India has been at the forefront of this challenge. In the pre-monsoon season of 2026, temperatures exceeded 46°C across many parts of the country, with northern and central India experiencing prolonged and intense heatwaves. At the same time, compound heatwave–PM2.5 pollution events during the pre-monsoon season have become increasingly frequent, drawing renewed attention to their impacts on public health and air quality. But why are these compound extreme events becoming more common, and what are the key mechanisms driving their formation?
A research team from Hong Kong Baptist University investigated pre-monsoon heat-PM2.5 compound extreme events across India between 2017 and 2024 by combining ground observations, satellite measurements, and atmospheric chemistry simulations. The team found that the frequency of compound extreme events increased markedly after 2020. During April 2022, more than 70% of severe PM2.5 pollution episodes across northern India occurred simultaneously with heat waves, highlighting the increasing overlap between the two environmental hazards.
Further analyses revealed that large-scale atmospheric circulation played a central role in shaping these compound extremes. An anomalous anticyclonic circulation over northern India strengthened heat conditions while generating anomalous southeasterly winds that transported additional pollution precursors into the region. These meteorological conditions accelerated atmospheric chemical processes, substantially enhancing the formation of secondary organic aerosols (SOA), a major component of PM2.5. Atmospheric chemistry simulations showed that SOA production increased by approximately 2.3 times during compound events, contributing significantly to elevated particle concentrations under extreme heat.
“Most studies have focused on heat waves and air pollution separately,” said Huibin Dai, lead author of the study. “This study shows that large-scale atmospheric circulation can simultaneously intensify heat and promote secondary aerosol formation, creating favorable conditions for compound heat-PM2.5 extremes. It highlights an important pathway through which climate variability can influence both weather extremes and air quality.”
The findings suggest that understanding future air quality requires considering not only emissions but also climate-driven changes in atmospheric circulation and atmospheric chemistry. As climate warming is expected to increase the occurrence of extreme heat, these coupled meteorological and chemical processes may further increase the risk of compound environmental extremes in densely populated regions.
“The next step is to investigate how compound heat-PM2.5 extremes will evolve under future climate change and to quantify their impacts on human health,” Dai said. “Ultimately, this work aims to better understand the mechanisms behind compound heat-PM2.5 extremes and provide scientific evidence to support early prevention, risk reduction, and climate adaptation.”
The research was conducted by a team from the Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University, led by Prof. Meng Gao. This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China.
It has been just three days since we learned of the sentence handed out to Hong Kong trade union leader Lee Cheuk-yan. Since then, thousands of you have sent off your messages of protest in a campaign sponsored by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and other global unions. The campaign is here:
We need many more of you to do so. Please share this message with your friends, family and fellow union members.
New podcast: Interview with South Korean union leader Chanyoung Heo
Chanyoung is leader of a small union in Korea that represents workers at Kuehne+Nagel, a German-owned logistics company. For 20 years, industrial relations at the company were good. Now they aren't. What happened? Why did the workers vote overwhelmingly to go on strike?
Listen to the podcast to learn more, including about the company's new manager, imported from Europe, who told the union that he did not feel bound by a collective bargaining agreement which he did not sign. Yes, really. He said that.
In Europe, one union has been giving cleaners a voice with a remarkable new podcast series.
Today I interviewed Mark Bergfeld. about the two groups of workers represented by UNI Europa's Property Services department -- security guards and cleaners. Mark explained some of the issues that these workers face and the challenge of organising them into unions. UNI Europa recently produced a five-part podcast series about these workers entitled "Unsung Cleaners" in which the workers speak and we get to hear their own voice and words. It had a surprisingly large listenership.
Niquelândia processes both nickel and manganese from Codemin and Barro Alto sites. (Image courtesy of Anglo American.)
China-backed MMG is urging European regulators to approve its $500-million purchase of Anglo American’s Brazilian nickel business, in a case that could test how far Brussels will go to limit Chinese control over strategic resource supply chains.
The European Commission (EC) is investigating whether the acquisition could allow MMG to divert Brazilian ferronickel away from Europe, potentially raising costs for stainless steel producers. EU regulators are expected to issue a formal warning over the transaction next week.
“Ultimately, we’re confident that DG COMP will put geopolitical considerations aside and judge this on the data,” Troy Hey, MMG executive general manager of corporate relations, told the Financial Times, referring to the commission’s Directorate-General for Competition.
The case reaches beyond a conventional competition review as Europe tries to reduce its reliance on China for metals and minerals following Beijing’s export restrictions on a range of materials. Ferronickel is not classified as a critical mineral, but European steelmakers are concerned that increasing Chinese ownership of overseas production could leave the industry more exposed to supply disruptions or economic pressure.
Supply concerns
MMG agreed in February 2025 to acquire Anglo’s Brazilian nickel business, including two ferronickel operations and two greenfield projects. The Hong Kong-listed miner is controlled by state-owned China Minmetals.
The commission said late last year that the transaction could give MMG the ability and incentive to divert ferronickel supplies away from Europe, potentially weakening the competitiveness of the region’s stainless steel producers.
MMG disputes that assessment. “The independent data commissioned by DG COMP is very clear and consistent,” Hey told the FT. “There is no ability to foreclose the market, nor is there any incentive to do so.”
Anglo has also argued the transaction should be cleared without conditions, pointing to expanding ferronickel production from other suppliers and European customers’ ability to switch sources. It said EU restrictions on Chinese steel imports also mean Chinese stainless steel cannot simply be redirected into Europe and should not be considered a competitive threat.
Brazil and Indonesia are notable ferronickel producers, while China does not produce the material, according to price reporting agency Fastmarkets. China is instead a major producer and consumer of nickel pig iron, another feedstock used in stainless steel manufacturing, while European producers also rely heavily on recycled material.
Critics argue those headline supply figures understate the difficulty of replacing Brazilian ferronickel. Nickel content, product quality, reliability and carbon intensity vary between suppliers, potentially making alternatives more costly or unsuitable for some European manufacturers. Brazil’s heavy reliance on hydroelectricity also gives its production a relatively low carbon footprint.
Wider stakes
The transaction is also attracting scrutiny outside Europe. Brazil’s competition authority launched an investigation following a complaint by CoreX Holding, an industrial group and regional competitor.
Opponents say regulators should consider the acquisition against the broader competition among major economies for control of raw materials and escalating trade tensions between the US and China.
That argument presents Brussels with a difficult choice. Competition authorities must assess the transaction on its market effects while European policymakers are simultaneously trying to reduce strategic dependencies and strengthen domestic industrial supply chains.
Blocking or imposing conditions on the acquisition could signal that ownership and geopolitical supply risks are becoming more important considerations in European resource deals. Clearing it without conditions would reinforce MMG and Anglo’s argument that concerns about Chinese control do not outweigh the available evidence on ferronickel competition.
