Shares in the company, a 2020 spin-off of gold producer Alkane Resources, have more than doubled in the past month in the run-up to Anthony Albanese’s long-awaited meeting with Donald Trump.

On Tuesday morning, the pair signed a framework agreement on critical minerals and rare earths that will see each country provide at least US$1 billion in investments towards an US$8.5 billion pipeline of priority critical minerals projects in Australia and the US over the next six months.

Speaking at IMARC in Sydney this week, Smith described the agreement as a really important development for the rare earths sector.

“But what we’ve really seen here, this supply chain is heavily concentrated in China. We’ve all been aware of it, and largely just been accepting that,” she said.

Smith said this year the world had been complacent about the concentration of the rare earths supply chain and a lack of investments to counter it.

“We’ve seen that shift, and there’s now an urgency of action, and I think [Tuesday’s] announcement from the Prime Minister of Australia and the President about creating these frameworks across jurisdictions to accelerate a pipeline of projects to develop this ecosystem that is this alternative supply chain is very exciting,” she said.

Expansion funded

Earlier this week, ASM raised A$55 million in a placement to new and existing institutional investors in Australia and abroad, with significant interest reported from US investors.

“It is a very exciting time for rare earths … and what we’re doing in ASM is we’re building a global rare earths and critical minerals business in that exciting environment,” Smith said.

ASM’s strategy is to build a “mine to metals” business but it has taken the unusual step of committing its capital to the final step of the process.

ASM has invested more than A$60 million to build a metals facility in South Korea, which has a capacity of 1300 tonnes per annum.

The facility has been in production since 2022 and is in the ramp-up phase, producing neodymium iron boron (NdFeB) alloys and neodymium-praseodymium metal.

ASM has been focused on building up its network of western magnet producers, which include American companies Noveon Magnetics and USA Rare Earths, Germany’s Vacuumschmelze and Canada’s Neo Performance Materials.

“This is an area that has been moving slowly until this year, but we’re seeing rapid increase in the demand for these non-China magnets at the moment, and that’s exciting for us,” Smith said.

“There’s lots of opportunity there, as these magnet producers start to ramp up their productions, for us to be able to ramp up our facility in Korea to be able to support them.”

The cash raised this week will fund the doubling of capacity to 3600tpa.

“That will take us about 20 months, we believe, from the point where we commit, but we’re also working on expanding the product mix, so in addition to the light rare earth metals and those alloys, we’ve been developing our own technology to be able to metallise the heavy rare earths,” Smith said.

“This is a very scarce technical capability outside of China, and as far as I’m aware, there’s only one other non-China casthouse globally that’s capable of doing this, so that’s exciting for us.”

The company is also making preliminary plans for a further expansion to 5600tpa, as well as replicating the facility in Europe and the US.

“There’s an enormous amount of support in the US, both at federal level and at state level, to be able to put these facilities in place,” Smith said.

“We’ve got plans to be able to finalise our site selection this year. We’re already well progressed in the process with the DoW [Department of War] for funding support for this facility, and we will move into permitting for that next year, and construction on that in ‘27.”

‘Mine’ aspect progressing

ASM is buying third-party feed for its plant in Korea but the plan is for its fully permitted Dubbo project in New South Wales to eventually supply it and other potential facilities.

The full project, which would produce light rare earths, as well as zirconia, hafnium and niobium, and has capital costs of A$1.67 billion as of 2021.

“Really the challenge for us has been getting the capital to be able to take that investment decision and bring it into production,” Smith said.

To address that, in July, ASM released a scoping study into a rare earth-only heap leach option to produce 1157tpa of NdPr, 13tpa of terbium oxide and 72tpa of dysprosium oxide.

Capex was A$740 million and the project returned a pre-tax net present value of A$1.46 billion and an internal rate of return of 22.9%.

“I don’t actually know any other project globally that is taking mine all the way through to oxide for less than three quarters of a billion,” Smith said.

The project has already attracted A$1.5 billion in export credit agency support and Smith said the company hoped to finalise funding next year.