Silmet’s rare-earth plants survive as Narva magnets draw EU cash

An article published on 23 October 2026 looks back eleven and a half years to early April 2011, when newspapers reported that former prime minister Tiit Vähi had sold rare-earth producer Silmet for $89 million. The piece presents Silmet as having started as a uranium-enrichment plant and shows what it calls the company’s occupation-era technology.

When rare-earth prices surged because of Chinese export restrictions, the Sillamäe plant appeared poised to be one of the big winners of that global crunch. US-listed Molycorp promised to bring Estonia independence from Chinese raw materials and, by Vähi’s own account, gave him the best deal of his life.

The boom later gave way to a sharp fall in Molycorp’s share price, bankruptcy protection and a restructuring into Neo Performance Materials. The Sillamäe and Narva plants remained in operation, but amid new challenges. The article says a fresh European Commission cash injection for the Narva magnet plant now opens another chapter.