The global race to secure critical minerals has opened up a world of opportunity for developing countries with the good fortune to have the right deposits of the right metals.The trick is to capture as much value as possible from the metallic riches in the ground.
Processing is an obvious answer. Building smelters to transform ore into metal not only captures more value but offers a pathway to broader industrial and economic development.
For Western policymakers, it's also a way of loosening China's grip on midstream capacity across much of the critical metals spectrum.
However, the number of barriers to establishing a successful processing business is "vast", according to a joint analysis by consultancy CRU and the World Bank released last month.
Power supply, infrastructure, logistics, technical capacity and policy must all be right to make what is a low-margin business profitable over the course of low-price cycles.
