How should U.S. supply chains respond to China's threat to cut off access to critical minerals? Carrie Wibben Kaupp, president of Exiger, stresses the need for multi-tier visibility.

China’s dominance over the global market for critical minerals isn’t a new problem, but in response to the trade war with the U.S., it has “significantly escalated weaponization of the periodic table,” Wibben Kaupp says. 

The U.S. and its allies have an “incredible” reliance on China’s supply of critical minerals, including 100% of seven of them, and 50% of another 30 to 40. “It’s an area where China has a strategic advantage that is pretty crippling and devastating if they decide to ban exports to the U.S.,” she says.

Indeed, China has recently done just that for a number of rare earth minerals, escalating geopolitical tensions with the U.S. that began with the Trump Administration’s imposition of huge new tariffs on Chinese goods.

With the dire prospect of a complete cutoff of essential minerals that go into a broad range of high-tech products, U.S. supply leaders need to acquire a full understanding of what their products are made of. Most manufacturers today lack visibility of contents all the way to the raw-materials stage. Typically, Wibben Kaupp says, they can’t see beyond a single tier of suppliers.

The information that companies need to make that assessment is buried in technical documents that rarely reach the executive suite, she says. To acquire the necessary visibility and propagate information throughout the organization, they need to adopt technology tools, including artificial intelligence. The right systems can break apart bills of materials and identify “where all of that downstream sourcing is coming from.”