6% to 60%.
Control not included.

Indonesia rebuilt the world’s nickel supply on purpose, in a decade.

Less than 6 per cent. That was Indonesia’s share of global mined nickel in 2015, the year after its first ban on raw ore exports took effect. By 2024 the figure was 62 per cent. No major commodity has had its supply base rebuilt so quickly or concentrated so tightly in one country: Indonesian mine output rose from 130,000 tonnes in 2015 to 2.31 million in 2024, and the value of the country’s nickel exports followed, from $3.3bn in 2017–18 to $34.3bn in 2022 by the government’s own count. 1 2 3

This was not an accident of geology. It was policy. The 2009 Mining Law mandated domestic processing; the ban bit for nickel in 2014, was relaxed in 2017, then reimposed in full in January 2020. 4 Stop exporting rocks, force the smelters to come to the ore, capture the value that used to accrue offshore. Chinese capital moved in at scale. By any conventional metric of industrial policy, Indonesia won. The uncomfortable part is what winning bought.

Controlling supply has not meant controlling price or capturing value.

The same policy that gave Indonesia the tonnes flooded the market until it broke the price. LME nickel closed at $48,078 a tonne on 7 March 2022, before a short squeeze briefly took it above $100,000; 5 by 2025 it had touched a low of about $13,865, more than 70 per cent lower on ZMK’s arithmetic. 6 Indonesian refined output had turned a market in deficit into a structural surplus and held it there: LME inventories climbed from about 37,000 tonnes in September 2023 to 250,000 by December 2025. 7 6 Indonesia had become nickel’s swing producer, and its first casualty was nickel itself.

Its second casualty was everyone else’s mine. In February 2024 BHP booked a $3.5bn pre-tax impairment on its Western Australian nickel division; by July it had decided to suspend the business, citing oversupply and alternative low-cost nickel supply. 8 Australian mine output fell from 149,000 tonnes in 2023 to 110,000 in 2024. 1 A producer large enough to set a commodity’s price is large enough to destroy it, and a cost base among the world’s lowest leaves Indonesian supply almost indifferent to the falls that force higher-cost rivals to close.

Sovereignty over the ore, it emerges, is not sovereignty over the value chain that processes it.

This is where the value question sharpens. Roughly $30bn of Chinese investment, on a Brookings estimate, built the machine the policy summoned. 9 Chinese firms have constructed more than 90 per cent of the country’s nickel smelters; 10 Tsingshan and Jiangsu Delong alone account for over 70 per cent of refining capacity, and Chinese-controlled companies produce roughly 80 per cent of Indonesia’s battery-grade nickel. 11 Indonesia captured the tonnage, the export line and tens of thousands of jobs. What it captured less of was the margin, the process technology and the offtake, which sit largely with the partners who financed and operate the plants.

The legal coda is its own lesson in the limits of control. The European Union challenged the export ban at the WTO and won: in November 2022 a dispute panel ruled against the ban, and in December Indonesia appealed. 12 It appealed into a void: the WTO’s Appellate Body has been unable to function since 2019, after the United States blocked the appointment of judges, so the ruling sits unenforced. The rules-based trade system delivered a verdict it had no machinery to impose. For any resource nation weighing whether to copy the playbook, that unenforced ruling is the most instructive precedent of all.

Then there is the carbon. Battery-grade nickel from Indonesia’s laterite ore releases two to six times the CO₂ of the sulfide route mined in Canada, Russia or Australia, because the parks run on captive coal. 9 “Green nickel,” produced to feed the EV transition, has become one of the most carbon-intensive forms of heavy industry on the planet, and the premium markets of that transition are now being wired to keep it out.

The cheapest tonne can be the least valuable one.

The decisive point for investors is commercial, though it is converging with the moral one. Until the US consumer EV credit ended in September 2025, its foreign-entity-of-concern rules excluded any battery mineral more than 25 per cent owned or controlled by a Chinese entity, a test almost all Indonesian nickel failed. 14 15 The EU’s carbon border levy entered its definitive phase in 2026, 16 and its battery passport, demanding provenance and carbon data, becomes mandatory in February 2027. 17 Price is starting to depend on how a molecule was made and who made it, not merely on what it is.

Jakarta’s own response is the tell. Having built a Chinese-financed, coal-powered export machine, it is now trying to retrofit it for a Western market that is closing: pressing for a critical-minerals deal with Washington, 18 nudging producers toward part-Western structures such as the Ford–Vale–Huayou joint venture, 19 and floating an “OPEC of nickel” 20 to defend the price it spent a decade destroying. The clearest beneficiaries of the saga may prove to be the Western sulfide projects, lower-carbon and outside the China supply chain, whose strategic value rises precisely because Indonesia made the alternative so cheap and so compromised.

Strip the story to its spine and it is one lesson in the difference between volume and value. A market you dominate can still dictate terms to you. The cheapest supply in the world is still worth only what the buyer of last resort will pay for it.