Most large European manufacturers can't see the majority of their critical raw material exposure. The gap is structural: the exposure arrives embedded in the parts and assemblies they source from suppliers, below the level any procurement system or risk register tracks.

China's 2023–2025 export controls brought this into focus. When rare-earth magnet shipments to Europe dropped by roughly 75% in May 2025, several European carmakers idled production lines. The exposure had been real for years. The signal had been absent.

Outside the Perimeter quantifies this at EU level.

In this whitepaper:

• How critical raw materials flow through supply chains into industries that never buy them by name – and why both EU policy maps and procurement systems miss them.
• Where the exposure sits across all 33 EU-critical materials – and which sectors carry the highest concentration of hard-to-substitute spend.
• Why China is the trigger but not the only choke point – and what the full supply-chain risk picture looks like.
• How to map your company's exposure from existing procurement spend data, without a tedious supplier survey campaign.