Indonesia's Economy Runs on Coal, Palm Oil and Nickel. Here's What That Means for Your Portfolio
6 min read
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6 min read
In 2025, Indonesia earned about $76 billion from just three exports: coal, palm oil and nickel-based metal. That is more than a quarter of everything the country sold to the rest of the world that year. This is Indonesia's commodity export economy, and it affects your portfolio even if you never buy a single ton of coal or nickel yourself, because it moves the rupiah, the IHSG and the price of specific stocks you might already hold.
Start with what each one actually earned in 2025, all from named, dated sources:
| Commodity | 2025 export value | Change vs. 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Coal | $24.48 billion | −19.7% |
| Palm oil (CPO and derivatives) | $35.87 billion | +29.2% |
| Nickel-based ferroalloys | ~$15.78 billion | n/a |
Add those three together and you get roughly $76.1 billion, about 26.9% of Indonesia's total $282.91 billion in exports for the year (Badan Pusat Statistik, Indonesia's national statistics agency). That percentage is our own calculation from the three sourced figures, not a number any single report states directly.
The reason these three commodities carry so much weight is that Indonesia does not just produce them, it dominates world supply of them. Indonesia is the world's largest thermal coal exporter, shipping roughly half of all seaborne thermal coal traded globally. It supplies close to 60% of the palm oil traded worldwide. And it mines more than half the world's nickel, a share that grew from just 16% in 2017 to 54% in 2023 after the government banned exports of raw nickel ore and forced processing to happen onshore instead.
Here is the mechanical chain, in order:
This is the same current account and reserves story covered in Indonesia's foreign reserves and what they mean for the rupiah, just traced back one step further, to the export earnings that fill or drain those reserves in the first place.
Prices move fast, so here is where each one stood in the second week of August 2026:
On the macro side, Indonesia's current account swung to a $4.01 billion deficit in the first quarter of 2026, equal to 1.1% of GDP and the widest gap since late 2019, a sharp reversal from the $4.0 billion surplus posted in the third quarter of 2025. Bank Indonesia's own projection for the full year is a smaller deficit, somewhere between 0.1% and 0.9% of GDP. The rupiah itself was trading around Rp17,800 to Rp17,900 per US dollar in mid-August 2026, based on Bank Indonesia's official JISDOR reference rate and commercial bank quotes.
You do not need to trade physical coal or palm oil to feel this. A handful of large, liquid IHSG names track these commodity prices closely, because that is literally what the companies sell.
Nickel gives the clearest recent example. ANTM (PT Aneka Tambang), one of Indonesia's listed nickel and precious metals miners, hit an all-time high of Rp4,970 per share on 26 January 2026. By 31 July 2026 it had fallen to Rp2,880, a drop of 42% in six months, tracking the same nickel price softness described above. You can check ANTM's current price and recent trend on its asset page.
Coal and palm oil names show a similar pattern of wide swings. ADRO (PT Alamtri Resources Indonesia, formerly Adaro Energy) has traded between Rp1,625 and Rp2,700 over the past year, sitting around Rp2,450 in mid-August. AALI (PT Astra Agro Lestari), a large palm oil grower, has ranged from Rp5,825 to Rp9,000 over the same period, last quoted near Rp6,525 in late July. None of these moves happen in a vacuum. They happen because the underlying commodity price changed.
If you hold IHSG index funds, individual mining or plantation stocks, or simply rupiah cash and bonds, you already have exposure to coal, palm oil and nickel, whether you chose it deliberately or not. The IHSG itself is not a diversified basket the way a broad global index is. A handful of commodity-linked sectors carry outsized weight, so a swing in one export market can move your entire Indonesian portfolio even if you never picked a single mining stock.
The practical takeaway is not to chase or avoid these three commodities. It is to know how much of your existing portfolio already depends on them, so a headline about coal prices or nickel exports is not a surprise. NetWort's Market page tracks the day's biggest movers across IDX stocks and crypto side by side, which is a fast way to see whether a specific commodity swing is already showing up in the names you hold.