Humanoids’ Insatiable Hunger for Minerals

Our Australia Materials Analyst Rahul Anand discusses why critical minerals may be the Achilles’ heel of humanoids as demand significantly outpaces supply amid geopolitical uncertainties.

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Rahul Anand: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Rahul Anand, Head of Morgan Stanley’s Australia Materials Research team.

Today, I'll dig deeper into one of the vital necessities for the development of robotics – critical minerals – and why they're so vital to be front of mind for the Western world today. 

It's Wednesday, June 25th at 8am in Sydney, Australia. 

Humanoid robots will soon become an integral part of our daily lives. A few weeks ago, you heard my colleagues Adam Jonas and Sheng Zhong discuss how humanoids are going to transform the economy and markets. Morgan Stanley Research expects this market to reach more than a billion units by 2050 and generate almost [$] 5 trillion in annual revenue. 

When we think about that market, and we think about what it could do for critical minerals demand, that could skyrocket. And the key areas of critical minerals demand would basically be focused on rare earths, lithium and graphite. 

Each one of these complex machines is going to require about a kilo of rare earths, 2 kgs of lithium, 6.5 kgs kilos of copper, 1.5 kgs of nickel, 3 kgs of graphite, and about 200 grams of cobalt. Importantly, this market from a cumulative standpoint by the year 2050, could be to the tune of about $800 billion U.S., which is staggering.

And beyond that market size of $800 billion U.S., I think it's important to drill a bit deeper – because if we now consider how these markets are dominated currently, comes the China angle. And China currently dominates 88 percent of rare earth supply, 93 percent of graphite supply and 75 percent of refined lithium supply. China recently placed controls on seven heavy rare earths and permanent magnet exports in response to tariff announcements that were made by the U.S., and a comprehensive deal there is still awaited. 

It's very important that we have to think about diversification today, not just because these critical minerals are so heavily dominated by China. But more importantly, if we think about how the supply chain comes about, it's now taking circa 18 years to get a new mine online, and that's the statistic for the past five years of mines that came online. That number is up nearly 50 percent from last decade, and that's been driven basically by very long approval processes now in the Western world, alongside very long exploration times that are required to get some of these mines up and running. 

On top of that, when we think about the supply demand balance, by 2040 we're expecting that the NdPr, or the rare earth, market would be in a 26 percent deficit. Lithium could be in a deficit close to 80 percent. So, it's not just about supply security. It's also about how long it will take to bring these mines on. And on top of that, how big the amount of supply that's required is really going to be. 

I know when you think about 2040, it sounds very long dated, but it's important to understand that we have to act now. And in this humanoid piece of research that we have done as the global materials team, which was led by the Australian materials team, we basically have provided 34 global stocks to play this thematic in the rare earths, lithium and rare earth magnet space. 

It's also very important to remember and keep front of mind that as part of the London negotiations that happened between U.S. and China, no agreement was reached on critical military use rare earth magnets and exports. Now that's an i