MP Materials at Morgan Stanley Symposium: Securing Rare Earth Future

On Wednesday, 12 November 2025, MP Materials (NYSE:MP) took center stage at the Morgan Stanley Virtual National Security & Critical Materials Symposium. The company shared insights into its strategic initiatives, highlighting both opportunities and challenges in the rare earth sector. While MP Materials is making strides in securing a domestic supply chain, it faces hurdles in technical execution and market shifts.

Key Takeaways

• MP Materials is focused on vertical integration, from mining to magnet production, to secure the U.S. rare earth supply chain.
• The partnership with the Department of Defense (DoD) aims to reduce reliance on Chinese markets.
• A new 7,000-ton magnet production facility is in the planning stages, with commercial production expected soon.
• Recycling technologies and strategic partnerships, including with Apple, are central to MP Materials’ growth strategy.
• The company plans to commission its heavy rare earth separation circuit by mid-2026.

Operational Updates

• Heavy Rare Earth Separation: MP Materials targets mid-2026 for commissioning its heavy rare earth separation circuit, a significant step in refining operations.
• Chloralkali Facility: Investment in a chloralkali facility is underway to enhance the cost efficiency of refining processes.
• Apple Partnership: A dedicated recycling circuit is being developed at Mountain Pass to support Apple’s sustainability goals.
• Magnet Production: The Independence facility is set to begin commercial magnet production by the end of the year, with a new 7,000-ton facility in the site selection phase.

Future Outlook

• Resource Availability: Mountain Pass is expected to support significant growth in rare earth production, ensuring long-term resource availability.
• Recycling and Partnerships: MP Materials is poised to lead in recycling technologies and is actively pursuing strategic partnerships to expand its capabilities.
• Magnet Business Growth: The company anticipates substantial growth in its magnet business over the next five years, leveraging its vertical integration strategy.

Q&A Highlights

• Technical Execution: A stepwise approach is employed to manage technical challenges, ensuring precision at every stage.
• Concentrate Sales: MP Materials has halted concentrate sales to China, aligning with DoD agreements.
• Refining Capacity: While specific targets are not set, the company expects its refining capacity to exceed 6,000 tons with recycling efforts.
• Yield Loss and Purity: The company manages yield loss through vertical integration and recycling, optimizing purity levels for market demand.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript of the conference call.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley Virtual National Security & Critical Materials Symposium:

Carlos de Alba, Metals and Mining Group Lead, Morgan Stanley: Rare Earths. We’re going to be hosting this session together with Stephen Bird, my colleague that leads the Global Thematic Research and Sustainability here at Morgan Stanley. My name is Carlos de Alba, and I lead the Metals and Mining Group in the Americas, also here in the Research Department. We’re going to keep it very conversational. We’re going to just go straight to Q&A. Please feel free to send your questions. The more, the merrier. This seminar is basically for you. We have some prepared questions that we’re going to start with, but definitely I encourage the audience to send the questions, and we’ll read it out to Ryan. Before we begin, let me mention some disclosures. For important disclosures, please see Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative.

All right. Ryan, thank you again for joining us. We were just talking before, what a difference three years or two years make in terms of the interest that we see in the market from investors in rare earths and even in MP Materials for sure. Thank you for spending this hour with us, these 30 minutes with us.

Ryan Corbett, MP Materials: Thank you.

Carlos de Alba, Metals and Mining Group Lead, Morgan Stanley: Why don’t we begin with something that definitely has differentiated MP Materials. That is the deal that you guys reached with the Department of Defense, Department of War. Why don’t you maybe tell us a little bit about the background, the history about it, the conception, the negotiation of what it really became a landmark deal, and why MP was the chosen one in your mind?

Ryan Corbett, MP Materials: Sure. Yeah, happy to. Thanks, Carlos and Stephen, for having us. Happy to be here. I’m actually sitting in my office at the Independence Magnetics facility right now. A lot of progress going on here, so it’s pretty exciting to see. It’s always good to get down to Texas. I think fundamentally, what you saw with our transaction and partnership with the Department of Defense really is an acknowledgment of the vertical integration strategy that we’ve been pursuing since 2017. We have demonstrated at scale at MP Materials the ability to bring back to the United States scaled mining, concentrate production, refining, metal making, alloy making, powder production, press, sinter, finish to a magnet. The thing that is often very underappreciated about this space is the number of process steps that are required.

We see a variety of different folks throwing their hat in the ring to do one part or another of the supply chain, which, of course, we will need point solutions in a lot of parts of the supply chain. What we really need in order to combat the mercantilist policies of the CCP that has put us in this position of supply chain insecurity is to have a national champion in the space that is scaled in all of those individual verticals. That is not to say, again, that there are not going to be other players there. I think what the Department of Defense saw is that MP has been able to demonstrate true production in all of those various verticals that are required to actually get us from rocks in the ground to a magnet in your electric vehicle or your iPhone.

Fundamentally, I think that’s really the differentiator. In terms of how the deal came about, certainly, I think we have been almost yelling into an empty hallway about the risk that this supply chain posed to the US economy for the last several years. We’ve kept our heads down, and we’ve executed on bringing this capability back before it was sexy to do so through a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. I think we’ve talked about the fact that we’ve invested $1 billion of private capital into this supply chain and created a capability that did not exist before. I think our engagement with the US government goes back many, many years. We had our first agreement with the then Department of Defense under Trump 1.0. We had a further technology investment agreement with the Department of Defense under the Biden administration.

Certainly, the world changed in April post-Liberation Day in the sense that what was always a theoretical risk of the Chinese weaponizing this supply chain became real. Frankly, no matter what everyone is saying about temperatures lowering, rising, lowering, the reality is that they have a gun to our head with this supply chain. Whether they pull the trigger or not is another story. I think that the importance of having a scaled capability in the West has never been more important. I think you combine what I just talked about a moment ago about demonstrating a capability at scale across the full vertical supply chain, and then the incredible necessity to move at warp speed to drive even further scale is what really brought this deal together.

Carlos de Alba, Metals and Mining Group Lead, Morgan Stanley: That makes sense. You just alluded to, obviously, all the critical steps and everything that MP is doing and will do along the value chain all the way downstream. Maybe for the benefit of the audience, you just had your earnings call last week, but could you refresh what are the critical projects along the different stages and maybe the timelines for those projects?

Ryan Corbett, MP Materials: Sure. Yeah, happy to do it. At Mountain Pass, we’ve continued to invest. We’ve been investing in heavy rare earth separation capability for many years. I think the new news, if you will, that we provided on the most recent earnings call is that we’re targeting commissioning of our heavy rare earth separation circuit that’s been under construction for several years in the middle of 2026. Importantly, we’ve designed the capacity of the heavy rare earth separation circuit both to separate our own ore and the SEG+ that we are currently producing and stockpiling, as well as bringing in third-party feedstocks to enable sufficient dysprosium-terbium production to satisfy our needs in our downstream business. There’s always been, particularly recently, a lot of focus on the heavy rare earth question.

I think for us at MP, what we are focused on is ensuring that we have the heavy rare that we need for our own magnet production. We have not needed to necessarily pound our chest about this, that, and the other thing. The reality is this facility, we put some pictures in the earnings deck, is very, very well advanced, will be commissioned in the middle of next year, and will support our own internal capability, which we are very pleased about. In addition to Mountain Pass, we have discussed our investment in our chloralkali facility. This is something that if you think about the process of refining rare earth elements at scale, it requires a significant amount of commodity reagents. We have a great asset on our site, a chloralkali plant that was built in the 2011 timeframe.

The prior operator of the site, frankly, did not complete a lot of the brine purification and sort of upstream steps that are necessary in order to feed clean brine to the facility and really create what is a very interesting closed loop that enables regeneration of hydrochloric acid and caustic soda with our own waste brine. That is something that we are excited about from both a supply chain security perspective and a cost perspective. It is one of many initiatives that are underway to continue to improve our cost profile on the refining side of the business. We have also announced pretty quickly following our announcement of the DOW transaction, we completed our negotiation with Apple. Despite what many may think, these were totally independent deals.

We had been working with Apple for nearly five years behind the scenes on magnet recycling technologies to, again, be able to provide a solution at scale to bring both post-industrial and post-consumer magnet waste to bear to create recycled rare earth products and then turn them into magnets at our Independence facility. We are building a dedicated recycling circuit for Apple at Mountain Pass in addition to building out incremental recycling capability both for our own magnet swarf and kerf, as well as the potential for other customer agreements to fill out that facility. That is something that we’re very, very excited about, earlier stage in that build-out at scale, given the recent announcement of the Apple transaction, but something that we think we’ll be able to bring online relatively rapidly. That is sort of the Mountain Pass side of things.

On the magnetic side of the world, we are working furiously to complete all the various stages of commissioning of the Independence facility to get into service here on production of magnets off the commercial equipment by the end of the year. We have been producing magnets out of what we call our new product introduction facility, where we have built out our various recipes, if you will, for the magnets that will be going into our foundational customer, General Motors. We will be transitioning that production over to the commercial equipment at the end of the year. We are also rapidly advancing the expansion of Independence to support first our Apple transaction that I discussed a moment ago. In addition to Independence, what we have talked about is our 10X facility. That is a greenfield facility where we will target production of 7,000 tons of finished magnets.

We are in detailed site selection as we speak. We are progressing, building the team very, very rapidly to oversee the construction and commissioning of that facility. We will continue to provide updates on that facility as we have them.

Carlos de Alba, Metals and Mining Group Lead, Morgan Stanley: Great. Before I pass it on to Stephen, let me remind the audience, if you have any questions, please submit them. We’ll be happy to read them, and Ryan will respond.

Ryan Corbett, MP Materials: Awesome. Thanks, Carlos. Ryan, I am really excited about the opportunity for NP, but also, frankly, just from the United States perspective, the steps you’re taking to help eventually eliminate dependencies on China. I think you laid it out really well. Before we go into a little bit more on sort of stepping up and growing further, I am just curious in terms of your general take from your dialogue in D.C. For example, we go down to D.C. regularly. We get a sense that there is sort of like this is an urgent mission from Team Trump to try to eliminate dependencies of all sorts, not just rare earths, but just more broadly. What is the messaging broadly you’re hearing from D.C. these days, given your relationships? Yeah, look, I could not agree more.

I think the reality is that if you look at what happened in these trade negotiations, you cannot doubt that the rare earth magnet issue played an absolutely critical role in the negotiation of those agreements and the shape of those agreements. It is something that we can solve, and we absolutely have to solve, given what depends on this supply chain downstream, right? If you think about all of the future excitement in robotics, AI, data centers, the physical manifestation of all of those depend on the supply chain, let alone the fact that 30% of magnets go into the automotive supply chain in some way, shape, or form, which is one of the largest employers in the United States.

If you think about the number of different industries that depend on a strong automotive business, I think it’s the single largest employer, soup to nuts, in the United States. There are so many reasons why having strength in this supply chain is a total game changer for the United States on the world stage. It’s something that we’ve acknowledged at MP and has formed a core part of our mission since we acquired the site in 2017. It is very refreshing to see real resolve in this administration to get this problem solved.

Carlos de Alba, Metals and Mining Group Lead, Morgan Stanley: Yeah, it’s encouraging. It’s obviously a long road to get there, but we got to, we’re going to take that road. It’s remarkable to me that just within the Department of Defense, you mentioned earlier, I mean, when you look at many of the US’s most important military assets, I mean, this stuff sort of shows up in ways that, frankly, aren’t always completely understood. Audits of different programs show that this stuff is probably more prevalent than appreciated. Pretty big issue. Ryan, I wanted to talk about growth beyond where you are now. I guess it’s classic. We’re investors. We’re greedy. Once you—.

Ryan Corbett, MP Materials: Yeah, what have we done for you lately, right?

Carlos de Alba, Metals and Mining Group Lead, Morgan Stanley: Exactly. I guess where I wanted to go is sort of as you deliver on the initiatives that you’ve laid out, where would the US stand broadly in terms of rare earths and sort of magnet potential? Where do we stand then?

Ryan Corbett, MP Materials: Yeah, look, I think that one of the things that we see a lot is a desire to talk about the issue as a resource issue, right? We need more rare earths. I think the fundamental truth from just the U.S. perspective is Mountain Pass and the ability to expand Mountain Pass is by far and away the best source and sufficient to support pretty significant growth on a standalone basis. Again, there are other technologies that I think are useful. I think certainly we believe we’ll lead in those. If you think about some of the technologies that we’ll use on portions of the heavy rare earth elements that are sort of less scaled, chromatography, things like that, we have that technology. We know how to do that. It works at smaller scale. Recycling is another area where, of course, we need more of that.

We think recycling can and should play a very big role. I think, frankly, MP will help lead on that front as well. If you think about it from a resource perspective, today we’re exporting the vast majority of our oxide and metal products overseas. As we build up our own magnet capacity, that will become internalized. I think even if you do the math at a very high level and think about 10,000 tons of magnets, the rough rule of thumb is divide that by two to think about the NdPr oxide that would be required to support that NdPr magnet tonnage. 10,000 tons of magnets is 5,000 tons of oxide. We’ve already told you we intend to get to a 6,000 run rate at the end of next year.

That does not include recycling and some of the other upstream 60K initiatives and other areas for growth. The reality is, again, from a resource perspective, we feel very good about being able to supply the United States from a resource perspective. Of course, the question becomes, okay, well, if that is the case, do you guys see the opportunity to grow the magnet business as well to sort of continue to stay matched there? I think we look at that all the time. Our main focus right now is heads-down execution mode. Undoubtedly, if you think about the incremental material that we will bring to bear in Mountain Pass through recycling, through upstream 60K, through other partnerships that we think about all the time, there is a real opportunity to scale this business very, very significantly over the next five plus years.

Carlos de Alba, Metals and Mining Group Lead, Morgan Stanley: That’s a great overview. We’ve gotten a number of investor questions, which is great. A lot of engagement here. I want to go to one of the questions, Ryan, which deals with sort of just managing the technical execution challenges. The question is, some of the difficulties that Molycorp faced were technical, trying to do too much at once, having multiple processing. How have you characterized the technical challenges, and how are you managing these differently? How are you sort of managing that?

Ryan Corbett, MP Materials: Sure. Yeah, I think fundamentally, we see the comparison of the prior operator. We see dumping blamed for their failure. The reality is, until recently, we had no air cover on pricing either, and we thrived as a public company. That alone is certainly not the reason that we’re in this position. We’ve seen technical challenges as the blame. The reality is, if you step back and look at what really happened, it was a flawed business plan and a flawed flowsheet layered on top of each other, right? The reality is that we have approached this from the perspective of, despite doing a lot at once, ensuring that we actually approach it in a stepwise function and perfect or at least have visibility to nearly perfecting the first stage before we move on to the next, right?

We spent many years focused on ensuring we could produce a very, very high grade at high recovery mineral concentrate that we could generate a significant amount of free cash flow. Frankly, within a year, when prices were high in 2022, we generated enough free cash flow basically to cover the entirety of the investment in our stage two operation to then refine that product. I think we were very methodically focused on addressing the issues of the prior operator and building a business that can self-fund in order to move on to the next stage. We frankly adopted a lot of that mentality as we move further downstream. Looking at stage two, certainly we dipped our toe, if you will, into the magnetics business starting in 2021.

We built a business, frankly, where we partnered with GM, who I think approached this industry very thoughtfully and allowed us to build a business where we took the risks we were comfortable taking. They took on some of the risk profile as well. It allowed us to focus on ensuring we were building that business thoughtfully from a risk-adjusted return on capital perspective. It really, from our perspective, did not require us to walk while we chew gum, right? It allowed us to build that capability from scratch, hire a team, foster innovation. We are at nearly 200 employees at Independence now. That would not have been possible without designing the business plan thoughtfully to be able to adjust for and control for that risk. Now we are at a position where we have got clear line of sight on our stage two business.

We’ve got clear line of sight on our stage three business. Now it’s sort of, okay, stage 3.1, if you will, of really going into expansion. I think that we feel very, very confident in the technical expertise that we’ve built over time. We’ve tried to demonstrate at smaller scale before going whole hog into large scale. Perfect example is this new product introduction facility that we built in the Independence plant. It’s all about just managing risk, frankly. Technical is always one risk, but that’s our job as management is to manage that.

Carlos de Alba, Metals and Mining Group Lead, Morgan Stanley: Fantastic. And so far, so good. You really deliver against a lot of people that were maybe skeptical when you first started with the project. We’re getting some questions from the audience, different stages. Let me go from the upstream to the downstream. The first one is, why did you stop concentrate sales in the second quarter?

Ryan Corbett, MP Materials: Yeah. I mean, the true answer there is we had actually decided to cease shipments following the reciprocal tariffs that started going back and forth. And sort of our view that we were at a point where selling that commodity for such a material discount to its intrinsic value didn’t make any sense. And so we had ceased shipments at that point. And then as part of our framework of agreements with the Department of Defense, we further agreed at that point that we would no longer sell any of our products into the Chinese market. And so that’s the sort of two prongs of that approach.

Carlos de Alba, Metals and Mining Group Lead, Morgan Stanley: All right. Moving on to stage two, the question is, what would be the absolute maximum capacity in that stage two?

Ryan Corbett, MP Materials: You’ll find out over time. Fundamentally, as a team, we don’t like setting new targets before we’ve got the absolute clear line of sight, at least on the same assets, right? I told you it’s 1,000 tons of Independence on this equipment. I am telling you I’m going to get to 3,000, but that’s a new investment. In the stage two refining, we’re going to get you to 6,000, and then we’re going to tell you what comes next. I think undoubtedly, if you layer in the recycling capabilities, certainly our ability to produce will be well in excess of 6,000 tons when you bring that capability to bear. I do think just from a virgin material perspective, our view is there likely is some real headway there on the refining circuits over time as we dial them in.

Carlos de Alba, Metals and Mining Group Lead, Morgan Stanley: Staying in that stage two, the next question is, can you process heavy rare earths like terbium, dysprosium, and samarium? Another question on this area is, how will MP secure all the heavy rare earths that are needed to scale up the magnet production?

Ryan Corbett, MP Materials: Sure. Yeah. Certainly, we absolutely can process and produce heavy rare earths. We are producing at scale, SEG+ concentrate, and have been for the last two years. The heavy rare earth refining circuit, as I mentioned, will be commissioned mid-next year. The vast majority of that investment, frankly, is complete. That was actually part of an agreement that predates sort of our larger framework agreement with the Department of Defense, where they were a participant in the heavy rare separation capability that we built out at Mountain Pass. As part of the new set of agreements with the Department of Defense, we are approaching the acquisition of heavy-rich rare earth feedstocks as partners. Frankly, there probably is no more powerful partner in the world than the US Department of Defense.

We are very encouraged by the interaction and partnership that we’ve had with them to date on working through the various opportunities for third-party feedstocks to feed that refinery above and beyond our own internal feedstock. As we talked about, we’ve sized the refining capacity to be able to serve our downstream needs. We feel very confident that we’ll be able to secure feedstocks over time to feed that.

Carlos de Alba, Metals and Mining Group Lead, Morgan Stanley: All right. The next question on stage three is, how will the company manage the yield loss in magnet making, which is around 25-35%?

Ryan Corbett, MP Materials: Sure. Yeah. I think that is fundamentally one of the reasons that we so strongly believe in our vertical integration strategy. If you are a standalone magnet manufacturer without an integrated recycling capability, you’re sort of forced to sell this product onto the market generally at some significant discount if you can even find the capability in the Western world to process this at scale. From our perspective, yield loss in the magnetics business is opportunity in the materials business. It is one thing that we are, I think, best positioned to be able to tolerate and create value both for ourselves and for our customers. The great thing about Mountain Pass is having the scaled virgin feedstock allows us to be able to bring in such a variety of external feedstocks given sort of the base load that we get from the virgin material.

One of the things that’s difficult about recycling is if you’re always bringing in different magnet grades, different magnet types, different compositions, it’s hard to get good yields on that product. Given the fact that we’ve got that base load, it allows us to bring in such a variety of different material and continue to produce quality product at high yields in the upstream business. The way we intend to manage it is to leverage our vertical integration and, I think, provide a best-in-class solution for the Western world.

Carlos de Alba, Metals and Mining Group Lead, Morgan Stanley: Yeah. That definitely is one of the things that, one of the many things that sets MP Materials apart, their ability or the presence that you guys have along the supply chain. One last question before we wrap up just came up from the audience. The question is about the purity of refined rare earths.

Ryan Corbett, MP Materials: Sure.

Carlos de Alba, Metals and Mining Group Lead, Morgan Stanley: It is of critical or is vital the level of purity for certain critical applications, and that this is something that maybe others have fallen behind or the US has fallen behind the Chinese due to the years of experience that they have. How are you going to solve this issue?

Ryan Corbett, MP Materials: I think different applications have different purity requirements, right? Certainly, you can tell that our focus on the NdPr side is certainly our existing magnetics customers where we are selling into some of the most demanding and scrupulous customers in the world, the Japanese magnet supply chain that’s selling into the Japanese automotive business. They are some of the most quality-focused individuals that we’ve ever dealt with. We feel very good about our ability to execute on that opportunity. Of course, the vast majority of product and growth over time will go into our own magnetics business. It’s actually one of the other elements of the vertical integration strategy that we find so interesting, right, is you see specifications on the market for certain rare earths, let’s say, where there’s a very, very tight iron spec.

Lo and behold, five minutes later, you’re going to take that material and mix it with iron in a magnet. Certainly, there are parts of the individual processes where iron could complexify things. The reality is that our position on both sides of the coin as producer and consumer, I think over time, actually will give us some really interesting competitive advantages to be able to avoid overprocessing to certain purities that aren’t actually necessary. While the market needs it and demands it, we certainly have the capability to meet market demand. Over time, I actually think it’s a source of advantage from a cost savings and complexity perspective to be able to see, do we really need to hit five nines on this?

Given the fact that we actually own the downstream piece, we could measure the true implications of changing the specification in a way that the supply chain’s not capable of doing right now.

Carlos de Alba, Metals and Mining Group Lead, Morgan Stanley: Fantastic. Thank you very much, Ryan, for joining us, Stephen and I. It was great to host you. Fantastic to see all the progress that you are making and all the best as you continue to ramp up the different processes and projects that you are working on.

Ryan Corbett, MP Materials: Yeah. Thank you so much, guys. Good to be here. Appreciate it.

Carlos de Alba, Metals and Mining Group Lead, Morgan Stanley: Thank you, Martin.

Ryan Corbett, MP Materials: Thanks.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.