Very simple but effective DD is always price trend, cuts thru all the opinions & forecasts you can ever find and paints a stark picture of the underlying business.
In the case of DyO that picture is a LT established down trend:
Jan 2014 $841kg to June 2015 $411kg saw prices more than halve as the fluff got blown out but the real adjustment was July 2015 when reality clearly failed to match the hype and the speculators that had been pumping the price were totally exposed, refer Fanya Exchange, et al. One Chinese billionaire alone was reputedly holding 600t DyO, the bust quite graphic:
Effectively that was the point where DyO was brutally marked back to mkt, true demand, in a matter of just weeks.
From that point we've seen another $100kg stripped off the price as demand falls away relative to China's gross over capacity, despite operating at just 30%, with the State buying 1440t into storage 2017. Now that 'illegal' over production has been brought in from the could those numbers can only get worse, although the Resource Tax from this month may give some support to prices.
Multi year down trend DyO demand & price is well established & documented, it is going to take a very significant development to reverse the decline let alone any meaningful growth.
Unfortunately for punters here two major positives for NdPr demand are working directly against you, the development of more powerful, smaller, lighter NdFeB that will perform at higher temperatures with little to no HRE additive (basically a done deal) and now emerging in commercial production, the final link of the middle supply chain, high efficiency permanent magnet motors purposely designed to leverage NdFeB, specifically with integral cooling, beneficial both to motor & magnet operation.
"You can offset this kind of thermal cut-off by using more expensive magnet materials – neodymium itself demagnetizes quickly as the temperature rises, but you can specify your magnets to include additives that bump the thermal shutdown temperature higher, as long as you don't mind the additional cost of these fancy high-temp magnets.
"The spoke motor has magnets arranged at 90 degrees to the hub, like the spokes of a wheel," says Foley. "And there's laminations in between each of those spokes. This arrangement gets better use of the magnetic material; it means that for a certain torque we can use 25 percent less magnet material, or use the same amount and get 25 percent more torque.
"It also means, because the magnet sits right on top of the hub, we can get water inside the hub and cool the magnet directly. So the spoke architecture gives us more torque to start with, but more importantly it lets us get water right underneath the magnet and get it much better cooled.
"We don't need expensive high-temp magnets. We can use the cheapest, cooking-grade neodymium magnet because we can keep it cool enough and still maintain the performance.""
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