China has made a decision to impose greater controls on gallium and germanium exports from August requiring companies to apply for export licenses. This may primarily threaten the ex-China semiconductor industry, but it also sets a precedent for China to ban the export of mined material similarly to Indonesia, Bolivia, and African nations in an attempt to maintain its domestic refining dominance. It also underlines what has been lacking in Western raw material policy for years. Three main questions need to be considered here. Firstly, what has led to this problem for Western manufacturers and what needs to be changed to prevent it from happening with other materials in the future? What else could China ban the export of to…