Importing Rare Earth Compounds into Korea: Which Licence, Which Code, and What '99.99%' Leaves Out

Three assumptions are easy to make about buying a rare earth oxide or salt, and all three are wrong. The first is that China controls "rare earths" as a block — or its mirror image, that cerium and lanthanum ship without paperwork. The second is that the Korean tariff line says something about the material, when Korea's schedule cannot tell a dysprosium oxide from a lanthanum oxide. The third is that "99.99%" on a certificate of analysis means a powder that is 99.99% the compound on the bag; on a rare earth certificate it usually means something narrower.

This guide covers the compounds themselves — oxides and salts such as carbonates, chlorides, nitrates and fluorides — from China to Korea: which licence each element needs, how Korea classifies them and where that breaks, what the purity figure measures, which Korean rules apply after clearance, and what to put in the specification. How the MOFCOM application runs is in our licence application guide; the chronology is in the export-controls timeline.

Disclaimer: This article is general practical information, not legal, customs or export-control advice. Our reading of China's control lists and Korea's tariff schedule is analysis; control status, suspensions and classification practice change, and specific transactions should be confirmed with a licensed customs broker and the relevant authority.

Two Licences, Sixteen Elements: Where Each Compound Stands

China regulates rare earth exports through two separate instruments, and every rare earth compound in heading 2846 sits under at least one of them.

The dual-use licence. MOFCOM and Customs Announcement No. 18 of 2025, in force since April 4, 2025 and never suspended, controls seven elements: samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium. For each, the list has three parts — the metal, alloys and targets; the oxide and its mixtures; and compounds containing the element and their mixtures. The text sets no concentration threshold, and its notes say these forms include, but are not limited to, powder.

A second group was added on paper and never arrived. Announcement No. 57, dated October 9, 2025, listed holmium, erbium, thulium, europium and ytterbium in the same structure, effective November 8, 2025. Announcement No. 70 of November 7, 2025 suspended Nos. 55, 56, 57, 58, 61 and 62 "from today" until November 10, 2026. No. 57's effective date fell a day after its suspension began, so on the text it has never entered into force. Lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium and neodymium compounds appear in neither No. 18 nor No. 57; neodymium appears only through NdFeB magnets containing terbium or dysprosium.

The ordinary export licence. China's Export Licence Management Goods Catalogue (2026), in force since January 1, 2026, lists rare earths among goods requiring an ordinary export licence (出口许可证). Its rare earth entry lists every oxide, hydroxide, chloride, fluoride, carbonate and other-compound line of heading 2846 we could match, including the mixed lines, with one carve-out: the LED-phosphor lines are excluded. The same catalogue exempts goods that have obtained a dual-use licence. The reverse does not hold: an ordinary licence alone does not cover a dual-use item.

As of early October 2026:

So no rare earth oxide or salt line in heading 2846 leaves China licence-free; what differs is which licence, and on which clock. Quotas went in January 2015 after the WTO ruling and export duties that May, so the licence is what remains. The ordinary licence is the calendar-bound regime our licence-deadline guide describes: under MOFCOM's export-licence measures (Order No. 11 of 2008, as revised in 2019), Article 30, it runs at most six months and may not expire later than December 31 of its year. That guide explains why the wall does not apply to dysprosium; for cerium, lanthanum, neodymium or praseodymium compounds it does. Article 22 of the same measures makes a licence good for one customs declaration unless the exporter is a foreign-invested enterprise or the catalogue says otherwise — and the 2026 catalogue does not say otherwise for rare earths. How quickly these licences issue in practice we could not establish.

November 10, 2026 — or January 10, 2027. No. 70's text still reads November 10, 2026. On September 28, 2026, MOFCOM confirmed that China and the US had agreed to extend the October 2025 Kuala Lumpur joint arrangement — the suspension's own framework — to January 10, 2027, after talks on September 20–23. We found no MOFCOM or customs announcement amending No. 70 itself, and trade press through October 7 notes that the statement did not name the rare earth measures specifically. Read it as: the political deadline has moved to January 10, 2027; the legal text of the suspension has not, as far as we found. Whichever date governs, if the suspension lapses the No. 57 text returns with an effective date already past; we found no source on how that would be handled and do not predict it. The purchase-specification checklist further down carries this date uncertainty as a re-export-exposure clause, keyed to whichever date ends up governing.

Re-export. Announcement No. 61, suspended on the same clock as No. 57, lists only dysprosium and terbium oxide in its Part 1 — not yttrium oxide or the others. If it resumes when the suspension lapses, a Korean firm reselling Chinese-origin dysprosium or terbium oxide abroad may be in scope — our reading, not a published interpretation.

The Chinese declaration. Under No. 18 the exporter must state in the declaration whether the goods are controlled and give the control code; customs may challenge and hold the goods meanwhile, so a specification vague about composition can stall at the border. We have no data on how often that happens.

At the Korean Border: Three Lines, Low Duty, Hard Edges

HSK heading 2846 has three 10-digit lines in the Korea Customs Service tariff table published in February 2026:

We found no quota-tariff row for these lines in the 2025 quota-tariff file; the 2026 list was not in our dataset, so confirm rates on the customs law portal before costing. What matters more than the rate: of the seven dual-use elements, only yttrium oxide has its own Korean line. The other six dual-use elements' compounds share 2846.90-9000 with uncontrolled lanthanum, neodymium, praseodymium and erbium compounds. China's codes are element-specific; Korea's are not, though the industry ministry announced in February 2026 that it would create and subdivide rare earth trade codes, with no timetable given.

Where 2846 stops. The heading covers rare earth, yttrium and scandium compounds, including mixtures of oxides or hydroxides and mixtures of salts with the same anion. The Explanatory Note, in the 2005 wording quoted by a US Customs ruling (we did not re-check the current text), sends mixtures of salts with different anions to 3824. Two products a buyer will meet sit on that edge:

• Doped or additive-carrying oxides. In HQ 967300 (2005), US Customs classified a yttria of over 99% Y₂O₃ with about 0.25% intentionally added sintering aid under 3824, not 2846: the mixture was made for a special purpose and the additive is neither in the starting material nor a rare earth oxide. A specification for "Y₂O₃ with sintering aid" or a co-doped powder can leave 2846. See our YSZ import guide for the YSZ version of this mismatch.
• Cerium-based polishing powders. US Customs has repeatedly placed prepared polishing powders — rare earth oxides with kaolin or other clays, or other inorganic compounds — in 3405. Pure cerium oxide stays in 2846.10.

These are US rulings; we found no Korean decisions on cerium polishing powders, doped oxides or mixed oxides, so such products can leave 2846, but we don't know what Korea decides. The boundary has a duty consequence: under RCEP for China-origin goods, 3405.40 carries 4.3% against 0% for 2846.10, and under the Korea–China FTA both are zero, which hides the issue until the origin document is wrong.

What "99.99% (REO)" Measures

On a rare earth certificate, purity is conventionally stated relative to total rare earth oxide (TREO). "Y₂O₃ 99.99%" means yttrium oxide is 99.99% of the rare earth oxides present. It says nothing about non-rare-earth impurities, water, carbonate, or — for a salt — how much of the mass is anion. Thermo Fisher states this for its Alfa Aesar REacton line: purities are based on rare earth oxide impurities, while its other high-purity lines are based on total metallic impurities. Its lot certificates show the difference:

• A cerium(III) carbonate sold as 99.9% (REO) reports TREO of 46.5%. The "3N" is cerium's share of the oxide; less than half the powder's mass is oxide at all. By our stoichiometric calculation CeO₂ would be 74.8% of anhydrous cerium carbonate and 57.0% of the octahydrate, so this lot sits below even the octahydrate. We do not know why; the certificate does not say.
• A gadolinium oxide sold as 99.99+% (REO) lists about 18 ppm of quantified rare earth impurities and about 111 ppm of non-rare-earth ones — silicon 40, calcium 40, aluminium 20 ppm among them. The label is met on its stated basis.
• A yttrium oxide sold as 99.995% (REO) reports thorium and uranium each below 0.2 ppm — relevant to the Korean radiation rules below.

For salts this sets the price basis. A carbonate quoted per kilogram of product and one quoted per kilogram of TREO can differ by roughly 1.3 to 2 times, on our calculation across anhydrous and hydrated forms. Ask which the quotation uses.

The Chinese standards use the same frame. A municipal market-regulation bureau's inspection rules for rare earth oxides list the national product standards inspectors apply — GB/T 3503-2015 for yttrium oxide, GB/T 4155-2012 for cerium oxide, and equivalents for the other seven oxides. Each has four blocks: TREO; the named oxide as a share of TREO; rare earth impurities relative to TREO; and non-rare-earth impurities (iron, silicon and calcium oxides among them). Each block has its own test-method standard, named in the specification checklist below.

Two consequences. These GB/T product standards are recommended, not mandatory, and where a producer declares its own enterprise standard, inspectors judge against that — so a certificate "per enterprise standard" is legal, and the buyer has to name the standard or the limits. And a standard number alone does not fix the grade: GB/T 3503-2015 for yttrium oxide, for one, carries seven grades from 3N to 5N5. We could not obtain the grade tables for the others and quote no limits.

Moisture after the mill. Lanthanum oxide absorbs water and carbon dioxide from air, moving towards hydroxide and carbonate, per a vendor application note and a 2018 thermal-analysis paper. Loss on ignition on arrival can differ from the mill's figure with nothing wrong in production. We found no equivalent sources for cerium or yttrium oxide and do not generalise. The same logic — the label is not yet the specification — is why our yttrium oxide page separates grades by particle size before purity: two lots at the same "4N" behave differently if one is submicron and the other several microns.

Korean Rules After Clearance

K-REACH. Under the current Act (text in force from May 12, 2026), registration is required before making or importing a new or existing substance at 1 tonne or more a year. Existing substances can still be imported unregistered during a grace period if pre-notified — until December 31, 2027 for 10 to 100 tonnes a year, and December 31, 2030 for 1 to 10 tonnes. We did not check whether each rare earth oxide or salt is listed as an existing substance or has lead registrants; that is a per-CAS check to run before the first order.

Hazard designation and MSDS. We could not determine whether any rare earth nitrate, chloride or oxide carries one of Korea's hazardous-substance designations, and did not research the MSDS submission duty for these compounds to source level. Treat both as open checks.

Natural radioactivity. Korea's Act on Protective Action Guidelines Against Radiation in the Natural Environment (생활주변방사선 안전관리법) requires an importer of raw material containing natural radionuclides to register with the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission if its concentration exceeds 1 Bq/g and annual quantity per site reaches 1,000 kBq of total activity; registered handlers then declare each import. By our conversion, 1 Bq/g of thorium-232 is roughly 246 ppm thorium by mass, and of uranium-238 roughly 80 ppm uranium. A separated oxide with thorium below 0.2 ppm, like the certificate above, sits orders of magnitude under that. The Act's scope points instead at ores, concentrates and crude mixed products — an inference from the Act, since we found no radioactivity data for commercial polishing powders or mixed carbonates.

Korea's Own Numbers: Where the Compounds Come From

Korea Customs Service import statistics, queried in October 2026, give the first Korea-specific view we have of these flows. Origin is as declared.

Yttrium oxide from China collapsed and came back. Imports from China fell to about 1 tonne in May 2025, 7 kilograms in June and about 200 kilograms in July, then recovered from August. January to August 2026 reached 370 tonnes, already above full-year 2024 (248 tonnes) and 2025 (199 tonnes). Our yttrium analysis cited trade-flow tracking that yttrium exports overall remained well below pre-control levels by May 2026. That was a global statement and this is Korea's; we generalise neither to the other.

Declared values do not match published prices. China-origin yttrium oxide entered Korea in 2026 at declared values of roughly US$14 to US$67 per kilogram by month, against US$100 to US$160 for Japan-origin material and the roughly US$1,100 per kilogram ex-China price for May 2026 that our earlier posts quoted from market reporting. Product mix, contract versus spot pricing and declaration practice are all possible explanations; we verified none, and leave the two figures side by side with their bases.

Origin is not feedstock. Japan- and Taiwan-origin material is a processing origin; our Japanese materials landscape notes Japan's own yttria imports were about 95% Chinese through 2025.

Non-Chinese separated supply, as documented. Lynas produced its first separated dysprosium oxide in Malaysia in May 2025. Solvay calls its La Rochelle plant in France the largest outside China able to separate all the rare earths, with a magnet-RE line opened in April 2025; France was Korea's top cerium-compound origin by value in 2025, consistent with that but not proof of supplier. Neo Performance Materials in Estonia announced its first separated terbium and dysprosium "process solutions" from a small line in April 2026 — not, on the more careful reporting, saleable oxides. We found no source for non-Chinese yttrium oxide at scale.

What to Write Into the Purchase Specification

1. Element, compound, anion and CAS, and any dopant or additive. This decides the Chinese control code and whether the goods stay in 2846.
2. Purity stated three ways: the named oxide relative to TREO; TREO as an assay; and named non-rare-earth impurities with limits — at least Fe₂O₃, SiO₂, CaO and chloride for an oxide, plus sulfate and sodium for salts where relevant.
3. The method for each block — GB/T 14635 for TREO, the GB/T 18115 and 12690 series for impurities, or whatever the supplier actually runs.
4. The standard and grade, or the limits written out. "Per enterprise standard" alone leaves the specification blank.
5. LOI or moisture and packaging for lanthanum oxide and salts, with where it is measured.
6. Thorium and uranium on the certificate.
7. The licence: dual-use or ordinary, issue date and printed validity. Clauses for a late or refused licence are in our procurement strategy guide.
8. The origin document for the Korea–China FTA or RCEP — 0% against 5%. We did not check the product-specific rules of origin for 2846.
9. Re-export exposure for Chinese-origin dysprosium or terbium oxide, should No. 61 resume when the suspension lapses (November 10, 2026 on No. 70's text, January 10, 2027 under the September 2026 extension of the underlying trade arrangement).

On arrival, check TREO and LOI against the certificate, and particle size and surface area where the application depends on them. How to draw a sample from a received lot, and how many lots say anything, is in our sample evaluation protocol; the PSA, BET and SEM/EDS checks are in the SEM-EDS verification guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do cerium and lanthanum oxide need an export licence from China?

Yes, but not the dual-use one. As of October 2026, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium and neodymium compounds are not in Announcement No. 18 or No. 57, the two rare earth control announcements, but almost all of heading 2846 is on the 2026 ordinary export-licence catalogue.

Is a mixture with only a little yttrium or dysprosium outside the control?

Not on the text. Announcement No. 18 covers the seven elements' oxides and compounds "and their mixtures" with no concentration threshold, and China has a tariff line for mixed oxides containing any of the seven.

What happens to erbium, europium and ytterbium when the suspension ends?

Announcement No. 70 suspends Announcement No. 57 to November 10, 2026 on its text — see above on why the governing date may in fact be January 10, 2027. No. 57's own effective date has already passed, and we found no source on how it would apply if the suspension lapsed. Until then these elements need an ordinary export licence, not a dual-use one.

Is cerium oxide polishing powder classified as a cerium compound?

Pure cerium oxide is 2846.10; US Customs has repeatedly put prepared polishes of rare earth oxides with clays or other compounds in 3405. We found no Korean ruling; for a formulated powder, an advance ruling settles it.

References (Public Sources)

• MOFCOM and General Administration of Customs Announcement No. 18 of 2025 (April 4, 2025) — control codes 1C902–1C908, notes and declaration requirement.
• MOFCOM and Customs Announcement No. 57 of 2025 and MOFCOM Announcement No. 61 of 2025 (both October 9, 2025, including No. 61's Part 1 list); Announcement No. 70 of 2025 (November 7, 2025), suspension to November 10, 2026.
• MOFCOM, explanation of the eighth round of China–US economic and trade consultations, September 28, 2026 — extension of the Kuala Lumpur joint arrangement to January 10, 2027.
• MOFCOM, Measures for the Administration of Export Licences for Goods (Order No. 11 of 2008, revised November 30, 2019), Articles 22, 29 and 30.
• MOFCOM and Customs, Export Licence Management Goods Catalogue (2026), in force January 1, 2026 — rare earths entry and dual-use exemption.
• Korea Customs Service tariff table by HSK line (February 2026 file) and import statistics by item and country (queried October 2026).
• US Customs and Border Protection rulings HQ 967300 (2005), NY L82553 (2005), NY A86695 (1996), HQ 951240 (1992), including the Explanatory Note to heading 28.46 as quoted.
• Municipal market-regulation bureau, inspection rules for rare earth oxide products (2023 revision) — GB/T product and test-method standards.
• Thermo Fisher Scientific (Alfa Aesar) REacton product descriptions and lot certificates for cerium carbonate, gadolinium oxide and yttrium oxide.
• K-REACH Act (text in force May 12, 2026), Enforcement Decree, and the 2024 amending Act's addendum.
• Act on Protective Action Guidelines Against Radiation in the Natural Environment, Enforcement Decree (in force September 8, 2026) and Enforcement Rule.
• Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources press release, February 5, 2026.
• Instrument-maker application note and Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry (2018) on lanthanum oxide.
• Solvay press release, April 8, 2025; trade and mining press on Lynas (May 2025) and Neo Performance Materials (April 2026); trade-press reporting on the suspension, October 6, 2026.

Control lists, suspensions and tariff data above reflect public sources as of early October 2026; the suspension's end date — November 10, 2026 on paper, January 10, 2027 by the September 2026 extension — may change the first section within weeks.

Nami Tech Solutions (NTS) works between Korean buyers and Chinese producers on these compounds, order by order. Our part sits between the two sides: determining for each item, against the current list, whether and how it is export-controlled before we quote; running the licence and end-user-certificate procedure where it is; confirming the impurity limits you specify against the lot certificate and agreeing the assay basis for salts per item, rather than quoting a bare "4N"; and shipping each lot against a certificate that states its methods.