When Amanda Lacaze became chief executive of Australian rare-earths mining company Lynas in 2014, few in the industry gave her much of a chance. Her predecessor had lasted 14 months. The company’s stock had fallen more than 90% over the past few years, and Lacaze’s background was in marketing, not mining. She had to crack China’s near-total dominance of the world’s rare earths — a strategically important but commercially thankless task.

As previously reported by MSI, Western companies have been scrambling to secure non-Chinese sources of rare earths, investing in projects in Brazil, South Africa and the United States. That race has accelerated amid Chinese export restrictions and growing demand for the magnets used in electric vehicles, drones and defense systems.

Lacaze recalls telling her husband that if she couldn’t fix the company, she’d probably never work again. In Australian business, “we’re less forgiving of failure,” she told The Wall Street Journal.

After 12 years as CEO, Lacaze, 66, will leave the company at the end of June having built a Western rare-earths powerhouse. In March, Lynas announced a preliminary deal to sell rare earths to the Pentagon, including the heavy rare earths that Beijing has used as a lever to threaten global industry over the past year. The company’s stock price is about 15 times higher than when she stepped in, and revenue hit around $470 million in the three quarters ending March, 70% higher than the same period a year earlier.

“There is a reason why we’re not all that popular in China,” Lacaze said after a recent tour of the company’s expanding facilities in Kuantan, Malaysia, where minerals from the company’s Mount Weld mine in Australia are processed.

Despite a trade detente between the U.S. and China, access to Chinese-dominated rare earths remains a pressing issue for global companies. The magnets are crucial components for electronics, automobiles and defense, and demand is booming amid growing adoption of electric vehicles, drones and other advanced technologies.

A report last month by the U.S.-China Business Council found that ongoing Chinese export restrictions have made some rare earths nearly unobtainable. Nearly half of surveyed companies said they were looking for viable suppliers outside of China but hadn’t found them.

Lynas has been a crucial relief valve. Along with U.S.-based MP Materials, it is one of the few major Western-allied companies that separate rare-earth elements at scale — and a big reason why China processes some 90% of rare-earth elements and not 100%.

When Lacaze took the position in 2014, the company had one big asset: Mount Weld, an eroded ancient volcano in Western Australia with an anomalously high concentration of rare earths. Lynas’s stock had taken off in 2010, when Chinese restrictions forced the rest of the world to scramble for supplies. But China soon resumed full exports, prices crashed and Molycorp, an aspiring U.S. rare-earth champion, declared bankruptcy in 2015. Many thought Lynas would be next. Its plant in Kuantan was struggling to separate out chemically similar rare earths.

“We had these assets that didn’t work. So we weren’t actually generating any cash,” Lacaze said. “I just felt like they needed someone to fight for them, frankly. To give it a red-hot go.”

She cut a bloated executive class left over from Lynas’s time as a top-100 Australian company, closed offices in Sydney and elsewhere, and moved the thinned-out leadership team to Kuantan in 2014. Debt repayments loomed, and she needed to win back lenders who felt misled about the state of the business. She wrote to a Japanese government-backed creditor, Japan Australia Rare Earths, proposing a debt restructuring. The creditor broadly accepted the plan, giving Lynas breathing room.

Five months into her tenure, she announced that 99% of rare-earth production was up to quality standards, compared with 48% not long before. “Lynas is here to stay,” she said.

Starting in 2018, successive governments in Malaysia threatened to shut down Lynas over environmental concerns. Lacaze said the company fully complied with regulations and was ultimately allowed to continue operations. She also built a parallel cracking-and-leaching facility in Australia, which was completed in 2024.

The company’s persistence paid off when, in 2025, China heavily restricted the global export of certain rare earths and magnets in response to U.S. trade actions. Lynas was ready to help fill the gap. It has since raised about $600 million from investors to expand production and announced a partnership with Noveon, a Texas-based rare-earth magnet maker.

Not every effort succeeded. In 2023 Lynas announced a $258 million Pentagon contract to build a rare-earth processing facility in Texas, but backed away in 2025. Lacaze said the plant would be less cost-effective than the company’s Malaysian operations. MP Materials is now building a government-backed heavy rare-earth separation facility in California expected to come online later this year.

Lacaze argues that Western governments approach the problem backward. Subsidizing customers to choose Western magnet makers over Chinese rivals would be more effective than building new plants, she said, because without it, upstart Western suppliers risk being undercut by Chinese competitors.

After leaving Lynas, Lacaze will lead the Minerals Council of Australia, an industry association. The company’s statement announcing her departure said she was retiring, but Lacaze disagrees.

“I think it would be wrong to say that I’m actually retiring, you know? I mean, that would be crazy,” she said.

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