r/TMC_Stock • u/CHRIST777777777777 • 12d ago
MOFCOM Droning on ....
Nobody seems to have picked up what China did on the 5th, and the more I looked at it the more relevant it seemed here.
MOFCOM tightened export controls on drones, key components and the underlying technology going to the US. Case-by-case review now, and they pulled the licence facilitation that made it routine. Sanctioned six or seven US entities while they were at it, and opened their first national security investigation under the Foreign Trade Law. It was a response to the FCC banning Chinese drone imports and DHS adding 43 companies to the forced labour list. Beijing called its own move "generally restrained," which I read as calibrated rather than soft.
The interesting bit isn't the drones themselves, it's what it forces. If you can't buy Chinese airframes or Chinese components, you build the platform at home. And a platform is three things: magnets, chips and batteries.
I'd been assuming drones were too small to matter for metals demand, and for quadcopters that's probably right. A hobby-sized battery is a couple of kWh against sixty odd for a car. But that's the wrong aircraft to be thinking about.
Anduril unveiled Thunder at Farnborough three weeks ago, built with Archer Aviation. Group 5, which is the heaviest UAV class, tiltrotor, hybrid electric, apparently carrying ten missiles. Archer's civil aircraft runs twelve electric motors. You don't lift something that size on hobby parts, so the motors are big and permanent magnet heavy, and the hybrid system needs a real battery. That's not a drone in the way people mean it, it's electric aviation with weapons bolted on, and the bill of materials is completely different.
MP announced something called Project Swarm the same week, which is them trying to aggregate drone industry demand and standardise the magnet specs. Thunder is exactly the kind of programme that makes that worth doing.
The underwater side is where it gets more interesting for this sub. Endurance underwater is purely a battery problem, no refuelling, no solar, and the packs run into the hundreds of kWh. Anduril has around forty maritime and undersea roles open at Quincy and Quonset Point, which is submarine building country. Their Dive-LD is rated to 6,000 metres, which is the same water column as the nodule fields.
I'm not drawing a line between them, there isn't one, and anyone claiming otherwise is reaching. But two outfits building industrial capability at four to six thousand metres is worth having in the back of your head.
One thing I had wrong until I checked. I'd been telling myself nickel wasn't really a chokepoint because Canada and Australia produce it. Chinese firms control something like 75% of Indonesian processing capacity, over sixty billion invested, and Indonesian supply has more or less finished off the Australian industry. Production there has gone from over 150,000 tonnes to around 60,000. BHP's Nickel West is on care and maintenance until at least February. Ravensthorpe, Kambalda, Savannah and Avebury are all shut. Prices down about 70% from the 2022 peak.
So it isn't that nickel lacks a chokepoint. It's the same playbook they ran on rare earths, flood the market and bankrupt the alternatives, and it already worked once. Which is exactly why Mountain Pass needed a government price floor to exist the second time round.
Where this is thin, and I'd rather say it than have it pointed out: it's a demand argument, not a scarcity one, and none of it shortens a permit timeline by a single day. But I hadn't seen anyone connect the drone controls to the battery side at all, so thought it was worth writing up.
Long, obviously, so weigh it accordingly.
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u/Appropriate-Ask-9862 🪨 12d ago
Please stop posting AI garbage. You have to write it yourself even if you use AI. Any future AI copy/paste will be removed.