A Batu Akik Bought for Rp10 Million Sold for Rp200,000 Weeks Later. Here Is What Actually Happened
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In September 2015, a trader named Amin sold a batu bacan gemstone, the kind of polished stone Indonesians set in rings and call batu akik, for Rp200,000. A few months earlier, he had paid almost Rp10 million for it (Tribunnews, 10 September 2015). That is a 98% loss on a stone that never stopped being the same physical rock. Nothing about the gemstone changed. What changed was how many other people still wanted one.
Batu akik is Indonesia's general term for polished gemstones, usually agate or a related mineral, cut and set into rings. Most of the stones behind this story are batu bacan, a type mined on and around Bacan island in North Maluku. They are collectible items, not officially recognized precious stones like diamonds or rubies, and that distinction matters for everything that follows.
The trend exploded nationwide through 2014 and into 2015. Former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was frequently seen wearing bacan rings, and a bacan stone he gave as a gift to a visiting foreign leader is widely credited in Indonesian media with turning the stone into a national status symbol (Bisnis.com, 13 June 2015). Within months, batu akik became one of the most searched terms on Indonesian internet, and people from office workers to construction laborers left their jobs to trade stones full time (detikNews).
Jhon Leonard, a 52-year-old gemstone trader at Kreneng Market in Denpasar with 20 years in the business, told reporters he made Rp20 million to Rp35 million a day at the peak of the boom, enough to buy a car from the profits (Merdeka.com). Ordinary individual stones were changing hands for Rp400,000 to Rp700,000, with premium pieces reaching into the millions of rupiah.
At the very top of the market, reported prices get harder to trust, not easier. Search for the record price paid for a "bacan doko" stone, the grade associated with the stones SBY himself wore, and different outlets give you different answers: one report puts a contest valuation at Rp3 billion (JPNN), while others cite figures as high as Rp4.2 billion or Rp10 billion for similar stones. Those numbers are too far apart to be rounding differences on the same sale. That confusion is not a reporting failure. It is the story: batu akik never had a standardized grading or appraisal system, so the same stone could carry wildly different price tags depending entirely on who was doing the pricing. This post does not treat any single one of those billion-rupiah figures as a verified fact for that reason.
By August 2015, right after the Idul Fitri holiday, batu akik sales at Jakarta's Pasar Rawa Bening, the country's biggest gemstone market, had fallen by up to 70% (Tempo.co, reporting trader Yudi's account, September 2015). Economist Joubert Maramis of Sam Ratulangi University explained it to Kompas.com the same month using the ordinary life cycle of a fashion trend: batu akik was collectible, not a real store of value like gold, and it hit market saturation unusually fast because supply expanded just as quickly as demand did (Kompas.com, 21 August 2015).
Three things compounded the drop:
Amin's Rp10 million stone selling for Rp200,000 was not an isolated bad trade. It was the ordinary outcome once buyers with something to sell outnumbered buyers with money to spend.
The market did not disappear. It shrank into a specialist niche. A Kompas.com report from Pasar Rawa Bening, published 16 July 2026, describes a "normalization" phase: INDEF trade researcher Agung Satria Permana says today's buyers are collectors, hobbyists and community members who understand a stone's quality and characteristics, not trend followers chasing a status symbol (Kompas.com). Traders who survived did so by shifting toward authenticity, documented origin and genuine craftsmanship, the same traits that separate a real collectible market from a speculative one.
Batu akik is an extreme, fast-moving version of a pattern that shows up across every collectible category: a rare, well-documented, high-quality item holds value with genuine collectors long after a trend fades, while an ordinary item bought because "everyone wants one right now" tends to revert to what it was worth before the trend started, or less. Our breakdown of collectibles and liquidity risk covers why the price you can point to and the price you can actually get on a fast sale are often two very different numbers, a gap that hit batu akik owners harder and faster than almost any other collectible category on record.
If you hold gemstones, jewelry or any other collectible as part of your net worth, NetWort's Holdings page tracks them under Luxury Goods, split into Standard (defaults to -15% a year) and Collectible (defaults to +5% a year). Neither default rate is calibrated to any specific stone or item. Given how fast a trend-driven collectible's real market price can move in either direction, as this entire post demonstrates, treat that default as a placeholder to replace with your own researched figure, not a number to trust as-is.