This is a genuinely incredible story that really shows how much more China keeps its eye on the ball than the West.

So a European startup called IB2 announced in the US the invention of an amazing new technology to upgrade low-grade bauxite – previously discarded as waste – into high-grade, which makes it usable to make aluminum and extract critical minerals like gallium, lithium, and rare earths in the process.

In the current context you’d think either Europe or the US would be all over it, right? Wrong.

Somehow the first facility that startup ended up building is in Shanxi, China – built in 10 months flat (which, as you can guess, is almost impossibly fast).

How? Why? Speed and efficiency. According to the founder and CEO of IB2, Romain Girbal, they received “massive support” from the Shanxi government and were able to move at insane speed. As he puts it: “You could never go that quick anywhere else in the world – only in China. It is unique.”

And no, they didn’t do it by trampling on environmental regulations which, contrary to popular belief, are now actually quite drastic in China. As Girbal puts it: “Building a unit in China is very regulated – environmental and dangerous materials [are subject to] heavier regulation. Of course we followed everything but we had the support from the Shanxi province to help us move forward. Sometimes, being a foreign company, things can be slow with communication issues. When there were sometimes slowdowns, they were here to help and to push.”

It’s not that the West rejected IB2 but they’re simply super slow. According to the article IB2 are still at the talking phase with the Americans (“IB2 is […] in talks with potential American partners to allow them to use more local bauxite, especially from the southern state of Arkansas”) and Europe, their home, is – perhaps unsurprisingly – not even mentioned in their expansion plans.

In any case the end result is that, paradoxically, China ends up first globally to implement a transformational technology that, as Girbal puts it, enables them to be “[less] dependent on Guinea and Australia [for bauxite]” and “bring back to China their mineral sovereignty.”

That’s what keeping your eye on the ball achieves.

Link to the article