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Law No. 147/2025/QH15 is a targeted amendment to the parent Law on Geology and Minerals (Law No. 54/2024/QH15, effective 1 July 2025). It adds a self-contained rare-earth chapter that the parent statute had only gestured at via "domestic supply priority" language. The 2024 open-question — whether a rare-earth-specific amendment would arrive — is now closed.
Key statutory features:
đặc biệt).** Rare earths are elevated above the parent law's "strategic and important minerals" tier. The new tier carries a stricter management regime than other Group-I metallic minerals.
("đất hiếm thô") cannot be exported. Only processed or refined rare-earth products are exportable, subject to the national rare-earth strategy and master plan.
processing, and use of rare earths are restricted to state-designated or state-approved organisations and enterprises — narrowing the pathway used in the parent law, which permitted private and foreign-invested operators under general licensing.
centralises geological data on rare-earth deposits, manages the country's rare-earth reserves, and regulates rare-earth imports and exports according to national needs.
has paired the law with a 100% physical-inspection regime for rare-earth shipments (in force from late 2025), making the raw-export ban operationally enforceable rather than nominal.
in favour (89.01% of total deputies); the bill cleared a 10th-session legislative cycle that also produced the Law on Investment 2025 (143/2025/QH15) and the Law on Artificial Intelligence (134/2025/QH15).
set up a state-controlled licensing scaffold but stopped short of an explicit raw-export ban. Law 147/2025/QH15 closes that gap and aligns Vietnam's rare-earth regime with the Indonesia-nickel template structurally (raw ban + downstream mandate) — but starting from a comprehensive 2024 statute rather than a piecemeal decree.
Materials, Energy Fuels, Shin-Etsu, and POSCO had been preparing Vietnam-routed off-take and processing JVs against the assumption that raw or minimally-processed REE concentrate would flow out of Lai Chau / Yen Bai. The amendment forces midstream processing on Vietnamese soil under state-aligned operators (Vinacomin, Masan High-Tech Materials), shifting margin capture and slowing Western refiner ramps.
and EU CRMA non-FEOC qualification depends on ownership-of-record of the processing entity. State-aligned Vietnamese SOEs and JV structures are not Chinese-FEOC, so Vietnam-processed REE remains nominally IRA-eligible — provided Western buyers can secure the JV access that the new law channels through state designation.
China's MOFCOM rare-earth export-licensing escalation (2025-04-04 heavy REE licensing, 2025-10-09 extraterritorial controls) made non-China REE supply a strategic priority for US, EU, Japan, Korea. Vietnam's amendment is the producer-side response: it asserts Hanoi's prerogative to capture the midstream margin that consuming countries are willing to pay for non-FEOC supply, rather than letting that margin accrue to integrated Western refiners.
strategic" tier.** Vietnam's elevation of rare earths above the standard "strategic mineral" classification gives it a legal vocabulary other EM holders (Brazil, Australia, Greenland, Tanzania) may emulate for their own highest-priority resources. Indonesia's hilirisasi was the first template; Vietnam's "special strategic" tier is the second-generation refinement.
binding operational rules — designated-enterprise list, processing thresholds, qualifying-product definitions for the export ban — will live in a follow-on Government Decree expected H1 2026. Without that decree, the precise threshold between "raw" and "processed" REE remains administratively ambiguous.
(Shin-Etsu, POSCO, MP Materials, Solvay) can qualify as state-approved operators via JV with Vinacomin / Masan, or whether the designation will be reserved for fully state-controlled entities, is the central foreign-investor question.
pre-2025 anticipating raw-concentrate export are not grandfathered in the public summary. Buyers with prepayments to Vietnamese miners face a contract-frustration risk pending the Decree.
Decision 1018 semiconductor strategy and Decree 182 Investment Support Fund anticipate domestic supply of strategic inputs. The 2025 amendment hard-codes that domestic-first sequencing for REE, but whether Vietnam-sited semiconductor and EV-battery fabs receive priority access ahead of export contracts is left to follow-on implementation.
a raw-export prohibition is vulnerable to GATT XI:1 challenge. With the WTO Appellate Body still non-functional, the litigation risk is theoretical; consuming-country governments are likelier to negotiate processing-investment carve-outs bilaterally than to litigate.