#industrial-overcapacity

#industrial-overcapacity

"The start of the year has been extremely sluggish for German industry," said Elmar Voelker, an analyst at the bank LBBW, noting that "the fleeting hopes of a recovery that had emerged last autumn have evaporated for now."

[I'm] lucky to get three cars a day. And most people don't even buy a thing.

China controls the overwhelming majority of global rare earth processing capacity, a figure that has remained structurally stable for nearly two decades despite sustained Western policy attention. The problem has never been geology. It's always been industrial chemistry at scale.

Tens of thousands of jobs could be lost if the UK's clean energy supply chains were to suffer a shock as a result of an over-reliance on China, a left-leaning thinktank has warned. A year-long disruption to the supply of essential battery components used to manufacture electric vehicles could wipe out production of more than 580,000 electric cars and endanger 90,000 jobs, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research.

China recorded strong exports in 2025 with a record $1.2 trillion trade surplus, as producers shifted their focus to markets other than the US amid Trump's tariffs. Customs data showed that Beijing's global surplus rose 20% from the previous year, which saw a $992 billion surplus. Exports in 2025 stood at $3.7 trillion and imports at $2.58 trillion, government data showed on Wednesday. The record surplus was aided by a 6.6% bump in exports in the month of December when compared to December 2024,

[The Trump administration] may have entered the office thinking that they could use their economic leverage to push China in certain policy directions," said Amanda Hsiao, a China studies director at the Eurasia Group consultancy.