Meeting point: commodity warehouse—high visitor turnout at Freeport Berlin-Brandenburg from politics, business, and the press

Our sales team explains to new visitors as clearly as possible which top-notch technologies incorporate technology metals and rare earths—and why these commodities are indispensable for the future. For this occasion, they place a 10 kg hafnium bar in the guests’ hands—priced at €50,000—to make technology metals tangible. Recently, this bar has increasingly become a kind of baton, held and passed along by our many new guests. Our visitors in recent weeks and months included a delegation of female mining entrepreneurs from Chile led by Iris Wunderlich (AHK Chile), representatives of the Ministry for Economic Affairs, and the Head of Division for Supply Chain Diversification at the DIHK, Phillip Flore. They all now know what hafnium is and what it is used for. Special thanks are due at this point to Thomas Loy from Tagesspiegel, whose article helped raise awareness not only of hafnium but also of the other strategic metals.

But where does this growing interest from business and politics in strategic and critical commodities come from? The answer is already in the question: a commodity is “strategic” if it is indispensable for key areas such as transport, energy generation, or defense. It is “critical,” on the other hand, when access to it is limited. This can be the case, for example, if only a single country mines and/or processes a particular metal. In the case of rare earths such as terbium oxide, that country is China. To reduce the risks of excessive dependence on individual countries, many countries are therefore seeking alternative sources of supply.