92% of motor stator lamination steel comes from two Chinese mills with no qualified Western source

FPV drone brushless motors require thin silicon steel laminations (0.2mm) for stator cores, and 92% of global production comes from Baowu Steel and TISCO in China. US and European steel mills produce automotive-grade electrical steel but not in the thin gauges and small lot sizes drone motor manufacturers need. A single motor uses $0.30 of lamination steel, so no Western mill will retool a rolling line for the volume. This persists because drone motor production is a rounding error compared to EV motor production, so steel mills optimize for automotive customers ordering millions of tons, not drone shops ordering hundreds of kilograms.