Kazakhstan's president has made Germany a direct offer: reliable supplies of the critical raw materials Europe needs, and joint industrial chains to go with them.
Writing a guest article in Handelsblatt, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said his country already produces 21 of the 34 raw materials the European Union classifies as strategically important — among them lithium, silicon, cobalt, niobium, tungsten and copper. Those inputs sit underneath the energy transition, microelectronics and much of the digital economy.
“We offer Germany reliable deliveries and propose building joint value-creation and production chains: from geological exploration and extraction through processing and component manufacturing to reuse,” Tokayev wrote, according to the German news agency dts. He singled out critical minerals, metallurgy, petrochemicals, foodstuffs and rail-vehicle engineering as the areas with the strongest prospects.
The offer lands at a moment when Europe's raw-materials strategy has become an exercise in risk management. China's use of export controls on rare earths has pushed Brussels and Berlin to look for suppliers outside a single dominant source, and Germany's own debate now includes proposals for state stockpiles and a bigger role for non-Chinese processing.
Tokayev arrives in Berlin on Wednesday for the German-Kazakh Business Forum — a visit that gives the pitch a venue and gives German industry a question to answer: how much of the chain it wants to build in Central Asia, and how quickly. Landlocked Kazakhstan also depends on routes that avoid Russia, which adds logistics to the list of things a partnership would have to solve.
For German manufacturers, the appeal is diversification. The obstacle is the familiar one: exploration, permitting and processing capacity take years to build, and the economics only work if prices stay high enough to justify the investment.
