Bunting / Magnet Applications (DuBois, Pennsylvania)

A bonded rare earth magnet manufacturer. The DuBois plant presses compression bonded NdFeB and injection molds NdFeB, ferrite and hybrid magnets from powder, with tooling, coating and magnetization in-house. It does not sinter: the company's own sintered NdFeB page describes sourcing finished sintered product from suppliers in China and Japan, and its samarium cobalt offering is framed as engineered assemblies rather than manufacture. Bunting's larger magnetic separation, metal detection and conveying equipment business at Newton, Kansas and Redditch, England is a different business and is not part of the magnet supply chain mapped here.

At a glance

Founded: 1959 — Bunting Magnetics Co. was founded in 1959 by Walter F. Bunting in Chicago, Illinois, and has remained family owned and family operated. The magnet-manufacturing arm came in 2008 with the acquisition of Magnet Applications Group Ltd. of Berkhamsted, England, whose US subsidiary Magnet Applications, Inc. operated the DuBois plant. Founding dates given for Magnet Applications itself conflict; see below.
Headquarters: DuBois, Pennsylvania, United States (12 Industrial Drive, DuBois, PA 15801). Group head office is Newton, Kansas; European head office for the magnet business is Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England.
Ownership: Private and unlisted. Bunting Magnetics Co. is family owned and family operated; Robert Bunting Jr. became president and chief executive in October 2022. No holding company, share structure or outside investor is named in any public source. Magnet Applications is a division and brand rather than a separate parent: the UK legal entity is Bunting Magnetics Europe Limited, company number 00790396, incorporated February 3, 1964 as Magnet Applications Limited and renamed January 3, 2012.
Revenue: Not publicly disclosed. This company does not publish revenue and no named third party has published an estimate of it.
Private and unlisted, with no revenue figure published by the company and none published by a named third party. Data aggregators carry modeled revenue bands for the DuBois site; they are not reported figures and at least one of them also states a founding year contradicted by every other source, so none is carried here. The one route to an audited number is the UK subsidiary: Bunting Magnetics Europe Limited, company number 00790396, files accounts at Companies House, most recently to December 31, 2024. Those cover the UK entity only, not the US group or the DuBois plant.

Capacity

Each date below links to the document the figure came from. A capacity figure with no source is not on this page.

What	Figure	Status	As of
Compression bonded NdFeB magnets, DuBois, Pennsylvania — tooling, pressing, coating and magnetization in-house	no tonnage published. The company states that its custom machinery manufactures compression bonded magnets in-house, and describes complete in-house control from isotropic NdFeB powder sourcing to final magnetization and coating.	Operating	Sep 2026
Injection molded magnets, DuBois, Pennsylvania — NdFeB, ferrite and hybrid blends in nylon 6/12 and PPS binders, including insert molding and over-molding onto shafts and housings	no tonnage published. Engineering, tooling and production are stated to be located at DuBois.	Operating	Sep 2026
Cumulative bonded neodymium magnets produced, company statement	one billion units to date, alongside more than 40 years of experience. This is a lifetime unit count, not an annual rate, and no mass per part is published, so it does not convert to a tonnage.	Operating	Sep 2026
US bonded NdFeB production, as identified by the Department of Commerce	one of three firms producing bonded NdFeB magnets in the United States, with the Electrodyne Company and Tengam Engineering. The same report identifies only one US producer of sintered NdFeB magnets, Noveon, and describes that output as small in quantity.	Operating	Feb 2023
Grain boundary diffusion, any site	no diffusion furnace, coating line or heat-treatment capability is described in any public source. A 2018 post from the UK side says the technology is being used by Bunting in the UK to produce a range of higher-performing grades, listed in a table; a 2024 post from DuBois describes the technology as industry-wide and uses a third party's process as its example. See the conflicts below.	Announced	2018-08-23

Narrative

Bunting Magnetics Co. was founded in Chicago in 1959 by Walter F. Bunting and remains family owned. Its magnet-manufacturing arm arrived in 2008 with the acquisition of Magnet Applications Group Ltd. of Berkhamsted, England, whose US subsidiary held the plant at DuBois, Pennsylvania; terms were not disclosed and the seller has never been named publicly. The Berkhamsted entity was renamed Bunting Magnetics Europe Limited in January 2012, and in recent years the magnet business has been consolidated under the Magnet Applications brand, with the former bunting-dubois.com and bunting-berkhamsted.com addresses now redirecting there. DuBois is the only site in the group that any public source shows forming magnets from powder. It presses compression bonded NdFeB and injection molds NdFeB, ferrite and hybrid blends, and the company describes tooling, pressing, coating and magnetization as in-house. Sintered NdFeB is sourced rather than made, from China and Japan by the company's own account, and the ex-China supply claim the company makes is scoped to the bonded products specifically. The Commerce Department's Section 232 report on NdFeB magnets names Bunting as one of three US producers of bonded NdFeB, alongside the Electrodyne Company and Tengam Engineering. Berkhamsted handles bespoke assemblies and industrial magnetizing equipment, with machining, testing and warehousing added at Swindon through the MagDev acquisition of October 2021. No capacity figure has been published for any of it. Bunting has not appeared in the 2025 and 2026 US magnet onshoring transactions, which have been sintered-magnet projects.

Where public sources disagree

Founding dates for the magnet business disagree. Trade press covering the 2008 acquisition gives Magnet Applications Group Ltd. as founded in 1955. A 2014 trade-press anniversary piece gives 1964, and the UK registry agrees: Magnet Applications Limited, now Bunting Magnetics Europe Limited, was incorporated February 3, 1964. The company's own current pages give no year at all, saying only that the history dates back more than half a century. The 1955 figure may describe a predecessor business that was later incorporated; no source explains the gap.
The founding year of the US entity is given as 1992 by a 2014 trade-press piece and as 1998 by a data aggregator. The company does not state one.
The company contradicts itself on which processes are in-house. Its material-specific pages scope in-house manufacture to compression bonded and injection molded product and describe sintered NdFeB as sourced from China and Japan, and the Commerce Department classifies it as a bonded producer. Against that, a 2014 trade-press piece attributes sintering, casting, extrusion, calendaring, compression bonding and injection molding to the company across alnico, ferrite, samarium cobalt and NdFeB, and the company's own engineering-design services page says it produces magnets from neodymium, alnico, ferrite and samarium cobalt. The specific pages and the government source agree with each other; the two broader statements are the outliers.
Two different supply-chain claims are made for the same products. The compression bonded page says the supply chain is fully ex-China and describes 100 percent domestic manufacturing; a February 2026 post describes a 100 percent US supply chain. Ex-China and US-only are not the same claim, since the first permits Japanese, Thai or European powder. No current source names the powder supplier, so neither claim can be checked against a document.
The current source of bonded magnet powder is not published. The only supplier ever named publicly is Magnequench, in a 2014 trade-press piece in which a Magnet Applications executive described the company as the largest North American customer for its powders. That is twelve years old and should not be presented as current.
Grain boundary diffusion is claimed ambiguously. A post of August 23, 2018, written from the Berkhamsted side, says the technology is being used by Bunting in the UK to produce a range of higher-performing grades listed in an accompanying table. A post of July 16, 2024 from DuBois describes grain boundary diffusion as something all major NdFeB manufacturers now offer and illustrates it with a third party's process, making no first-person claim. No source describes a diffusion furnace, a heavy rare earth coating line or heat treatment at any Bunting site, and grain boundary diffusion is applied to sintered magnets, which the company sources rather than makes. The 2018 wording reads as a product-offering statement rather than a process capability, but it has not been clarified.
The company's own site lists disagree with each other. The group about page names two locations, the group capabilities page four, a 2019 anniversary post five, a 2022 leadership release six including Ningbo, China, and a 2025 release adds Australia. None of them mentions Swindon or the Florida distribution business, both of which were acquired. There is no single authoritative site list, and the function of the Ningbo and Australian operations is not published.

Sources

Manufacturing and capabilities — Magnet Applications / Bunting (2026-09)
About — Magnet Applications / Bunting (2026-09)
Injection molded magnets — Magnet Applications / Bunting (2026-09)
Sintered neodymium iron boron — Magnet Applications / Bunting (2026-09)
Section 232 investigation, NdFeB permanent magnets — report and appendices — US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security (2023-02)
Grain boundary diffusion of heavy rare earth elements in sintered NdFeB magnets — Magnet Applications / Bunting DuBois (2024-07-16)
Bunting Magnetics Co. to celebrate 60th anniversary — Bunting Magnetics Co. (2019-07-23)
Robert Bunting appointed Bunting president and CEO — Bunting Magnetics Co. (2022-10-13)
Bunting acquires MagDev — Bunting Magnetics Co. (2021-10-14)
Bunting Magnetics Europe Limited, company number 00790396 — Companies House, United Kingdom (2026-09)

How this page is sourced

Everything here comes from public sources — company filings, annual reports, exchange announcements, government releases and trade press. Every figure is linked to the document it came from and carries the date that document was published, because a capacity number without a date is not a fact, it is a rumor with a decimal point.

What is deliberately absent: material nonpublic information. I have spent more than two decades in this industry and a good deal of what I know about these companies I learned under NDA. Those obligations do not expire and they do not bend for a website. Nothing I have been told in confidence appears here in any form, and nothing on this page — or missing from it — should be read as a signal about what I know privately. I hold NDAs absolutely. It is the reason clients tell me things.

Judgment is the other thing left out on purpose. This page reports what has been published and who published it. Whether a target is credible, whether a ramp will hold, whether a capacity figure survives contact with the plant behind it — that is the work I do for clients, and it does not belong in a free reference page.

Where public sources disagree, I say so rather than picking a winner. Where a figure has not been published, the field says so rather than carrying an estimate. An empty field is information too.

Public filings tell you what a company has said. Whether it holds up is a different question, and the one I get hired to answer.

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