#30 - Rare Earths Locked Down, Made in Italy Under Investigation, and a New Podcast Episode

⚠️ China tightens its grip on rare earths: European procurement caught in the trap

December 1, 2025: the date circulating in the internal reports of European companies. That’s when China’s new rare earth restrictions become operative, not just for raw materials, but for high-performance magnets and refining technologies, without which no advanced supply chain can function.

The final regulation published by Beijing extends controls to components previously considered “low-risk.” But there’s more: it introduces the possibility of requiring a license even for products made outside China, if they contain even a single trace of Chinese input, or if they were made using technology developed in China.

For anyone working in Procurement, this flips the risk map upside down. Compliance no longer depends on what you import, but on who touched what along the supply chain, even three or four tiers down. It’s a murkier kind of exposure, impossible to control with traditional tools.

This is a deliberate geopolitical lever. Many Western companies have no immediate technical alternatives. If licenses slow down, the first production stoppages could appear as early as 2026.

Brussels has called emergency technical meetings, but the real issue isn’t political: Europe doesn’t have the refining capacity to replace China, nor the expertise to produce high-performance magnets. Building that takes years companies don’t have.

This vulnerability isn’t an external variable. It’s built into the product. And you can’t fix it by switching suppliers.

Anyone who doesn’t start rethinking their supply chain now will simply arrive too late.

🔗 Sources: Chatham House, CSIS, CMS LawNow

👀 Tod’s and the €2-an-hour supply chain: luxury forced to look where it doesn’t want to look

The Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation that’s rewriting the Made in Italy narrative. The case involves Tod’s, one of the most prestigious names in Italian luxury, accused of benefiting, through a complex chain of subcontracting, from labor paid €2–3 an hour in workshops run by Chinese entrepreneurs in Lombardy and the Marche region.

The accusations aren’t just about working conditions, serious as those are on their own, but also about the fact that previous reports and internal audits reportedly flagged irregularities, without adequate countermeasures ever following.

For Procurement, this is a front line: if the risk was visible, ignoring it becomes shared liability.

Meanwhile, the counter-narrative wasn’t long in coming. Diego Della Valle has decried “media persecution” and spoken of a country at risk of destroying its own excellence. But Reuters reports a telling detail: the founder himself admits that the Made in Italy reputation is at risk if supply chains aren’t cleaned up. Translation: defending the brand now runs through transparency, not through the rhetoric of craftsmanship.

This whole affair is a mirror of a structural problem: the luxury supply chain, often described as flawless, runs on a system of micro-suppliers working on impossible margins. And when cost pressure cascades down the chain, it’s the last link that breaks.

The lesson is simple and brutal: a supply chain is only as ethical as its weakest supplier. And it’s not marketing’s job to decide who that is.

🔗 Sources: AP News, Reuters

🏨 Procurement that holds everything together, with Nicola Rehnicer (Villa d’Este Hotel)

In the new episode of the Compri Bene Podcast, we talk with Nicola Rehnicer, Group Director of Purchasing at Villa d’Este Hotel. From retail to startups to luxury hospitality: a career path that shows what it means to do procurement when you’re the gear that truly connects every department: from the warehouse to the dining room, from technology to management.

A candid conversation about how you build value in purchasing, how you bring in innovation and digitalization without creating fear, and why anyone working in procurement today needs thick skin, curiosity, and mental agility more than any other function in the company.

🎧 Listen to the interview! ⬇️