It takes two Hitachi Ltd. workers eight minutes to slice open the metal casing of the used air conditioner compressor. The prize inside: four wafer-thin magnets containing about 30 grams of rare earth metals.
Hitachi, Japan's third-biggest company, uses as much as 600 tons of rare earth metals each year in products including motors like those in Toyota Motor Corp.'s Prius hybrid.
Hitachi is one of hundreds of manufacturers depending on rare earth shipments from China, which controls 97 percent of world supply of the lightweight, malleable metals essential to hybrid cars, cell phones and hard-disk drives.