By: Praveen Choudhary, Founder, Nexon Geochem Private Limited
When we started building Nexon Geochem, we were looking at India’s critical-minerals opportunity from a slightly different perspective.
The question was not simply: Does India have rare earth resources?
The more important question was: Can India convert those resources into the advanced materials and products that its next generation of industries will depend upon?
That distinction is at the heart of India’s critical-minerals challenge.
India is building some of the world’s most ambitious manufacturing capabilities across electric mobility, renewable energy, electronics, defence and advanced industrial systems. Yet many of these industries depend on a relatively small number of materials whose processing and manufacturing capabilities remain concentrated outside India.
Rare-earth permanent magnets are one of the clearest examples.
Sintered NdFeB magnets are small components, but strategically they are anything but small. They are essential to high-performance electric motors, wind turbines, industrial motors, electronics and defence applications.
For us at Nexon Geochem, this presented an opportunity to address a gap that sits between India’s mineral resources and its manufacturing ambitions.
The real bottleneck is not the mine. It is the value chain.
India’s critical-mineral conversation has understandably focused on exploration, mining and resource security.
But a mineral sitting in the ground does not automatically translate into strategic capability.
Between the mineral and the finished product lies an extensive technological chain: separation, refining, oxide production, metal conversion, alloying, powder production, component manufacturing, finishing and recycling.
In the case of NdFeB magnets, this chain becomes particularly sophisticated.
Rare-earth oxides have to be converted into metals. Nd and Pr require molten-salt electrolysis, while heavy rare earths such as Dy and Tb require specialised reduction routes. These metals then need to be combined with iron, boron and other alloying elements, rapidly solidified into suitable alloy structures, converted into fine powder and subsequently aligned, pressed, sintered, machined, coated and magnetised.
Each stage influences the performance of the final magnet.
That is why we believe India’s rare-earth strategy cannot stop at securing raw materials.
We need to build the capability to process them.
This is why we chose to build, not merely trade
Nexon Geochem was established with a specific objective: to develop indigenous capabilities across the rare-earth value chain and create downstream value-added products for India and global markets.
Our flagship project is an integrated 600-tonne-per-year sintered NdFeB rare-earth permanent magnet manufacturing facility in Andhra Pradesh.
The philosophy behind the project is straightforward.
We do not want to be merely another importer of rare-earth materials who converts an imported intermediate into a finished product.
We want to establish an integrated manufacturing platform that can take the value chain much deeper into India.
Our technology-transfer arrangement with Giredmet, the rare-metals research and design institute within the Rosatom ecosystem, covers the complete production chain—from rare-earth oxide processing and oxide-to-metal conversion through alloy production and powder preparation to magnet fabrication, sintering, machining, coating, magnetisation and testing.
For us, technology is not an accessory to the project.
Technology is the project.
The missing capability is a midstream capability
This is perhaps the most important distinction that policymakers, investors and industry should consider.
Mining capacity and manufacturing capacity are often discussed independently. But critical-mineral security exists only when the two are connected by a capable processing ecosystem.
India needs to strengthen the middle of the chain.
That means developing capabilities in:
• rare-earth separation and refining;
• oxide-to-metal conversion;
• NdPr and heavy-rare-earth metal production;
• alloy production and strip casting;
• powder metallurgy;
• high-precision sintering and machining;
• magnetisation and testing; and
• recovery and recycling of rare-earth materials.
This is also why we see our project as more than a magnet plant.
A successful downstream facility can become an anchor for an ecosystem around it—equipment manufacturers, engineering companies, specialised chemical suppliers, tooling providers, testing laboratories, maintenance companies and skilled technical manpower.
Over time, capabilities that initially have to be supported through technology partnerships can progressively become localised.
That is how industrial capability is built.
Feedstock security must evolve alongside manufacturing security
The next question is equally important: where does the feedstock come from?
A domestic magnet industry cannot become truly resilient if its critical inputs remain dependent on a fragile external supply chain.
Our approach is therefore to build supply security progressively.
For the proposed facility, the annual NdPr oxide requirement is approximately 410 tonnes. Our sourcing strategy prioritises domestic supply, including engagement with IREL, while also developing complementary supplier relationships to ensure availability and redundancy. Feedstock samples from multiple sources have already been tested for suitability against the process and metallurgical requirements for sintered NdFeB production.
But our ambition goes further.
We believe India should progressively connect its own mineral resources with its downstream manufacturing requirements.
Monazite is particularly relevant in this context. Developing appropriate processing capabilities for monazite-derived rare-earth feedstock, within the country’s regulatory and institutional framework, could create an important pathway towards greater domestic supply security.
Our own technology roadmap therefore contemplates progressing towards monazite-based backward integration.
The objective is not simply to secure cheaper feedstock.
It is to close the value chain.
From import substitution to technology sovereignty
There is a tendency to define import substitution purely in terms of the value of products that no longer need to be imported.
We believe the more important metric is the capability that India develops in the process.
If India manufactures a magnet domestically but remains dependent on imported rare-earth metals, imported alloys, imported process equipment and imported technical know-how, only part of the strategic problem has been solved.
The real opportunity is to progressively localise the entire ecosystem.
Our project therefore follows a pragmatic approach.
Where specialised process-critical equipment is not yet available domestically at the required specification, it is sourced or specified through the technology partner. At the same time, standard and balance-of-plant equipment is intended to be predominantly sourced from Indian suppliers.
This is not a contradiction.
Indigenisation does not mean refusing technology from outside India. It means using technology partnerships to create capabilities that can increasingly be owned, operated, serviced and improved within India.
That is the approach we believe will make India’s critical-minerals ecosystem competitive rather than merely protected.
The next frontier is doing more with less
Building capacity is only the first step.
The next generation of rare-earth manufacturing must also become more efficient in its use of scarce materials.
Dysprosium is a good example.
Heavy rare earths can play an important role in achieving the coercivity required for demanding applications, but they are among the more supply-constrained materials. Technologies such as grain-boundary diffusion offer a pathway to improve magnet performance while reducing heavy-rare-earth consumption.
Similarly, recycling needs to move from being an environmental afterthought to becoming part of the core process design.
Sintered-magnet manufacturing produces machining residues containing valuable rare-earth material. Recovering that material and returning it into the production cycle can reduce virgin-material requirements while lowering waste.
Our project incorporates closed-loop recovery into its process architecture, and our future technology roadmap includes grain-boundary diffusion and deeper upstream integration.
This is where technology, economics and sustainability begin to converge.
India needs builders of critical-mineral infrastructure
The critical-minerals transition will not be achieved by one company, one policy or one project.
It will require an ecosystem.
Government has an important role in creating policy certainty and supporting strategic manufacturing. Research institutions have a role in advancing process technology. Industry must be willing to make long-term investments in capital-intensive capabilities. Financial institutions and investors need to recognise that strategic-material projects often have a longer capability-building cycle than conventional manufacturing businesses.
And companies like ours have to demonstrate that these technologies can be translated into commercially viable industrial operations.
That is the responsibility we have taken at Nexon Geochem.
We are starting with NdFeB magnets because they sit at the intersection of some of India’s most important growth sectors—electric mobility, renewable energy, industrial automation, electronics and defence.
But the larger ambition is broader.
We want to contribute to the development of an Indian industrial ecosystem in which critical minerals are progressively converted into strategic materials, components and technologies within the country.
The opportunity before India
India does not have to replicate another country’s rare-earth ecosystem exactly.
We can build our own.
We can combine India’s mineral resources, engineering talent, manufacturing base, growing domestic demand and technology partnerships to create a value chain that is resilient, competitive and increasingly indigenous.
The opportunity is to move from:
resource security → processing security → manufacturing security → technology security.
That is the journey we believe India needs to undertake.
And that is the journey Nexon Geochem has chosen to be part of.
For us, the objective is therefore not simply to manufacture magnets in India.
It is to help build the technological and industrial foundation that allows India to manufacture the materials behind the next generation of Indian industry.
If we can do that successfully, the significance will extend well beyond rare-earth magnets.
It will demonstrate something much larger: that India can move from being a consumer of critical-mineral technologies to becoming a builder of critical-material value chains.