Lim Hariyanto Wijaya Sarwono Net Worth: $4.9 Billion, and the Founder Is Still Chairman at 97
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6 min read
Lim Hariyanto Wijaya Sarwono's net worth is $4.9 billion, per Forbes' "Indonesia's 50 Richest 2025" list, published 10 December 2025, ranking him 14th nationally. He is also, by most reporting on Indonesia's business elite, the country's oldest active conglomerate founder still holding the chairman's seat: born 1 November 1928, per Wikidata and multiple biographical profiles, he turns 98 later this year. His fortune runs through nickel, bauxite and palm oil, three separate listed and unlisted companies, and his son already handles the day-to-day running of all of them.
Forbes' annual "Indonesia's 50 Richest 2025" list, published 10 December 2025, put Lim Hariyanto Wijaya Sarwono at $4.9 billion, 14th richest in the country. That is the figure this article treats as fact.
A separate real-time tracker, WealthRank, listed him at $4.4 billion as of 1 August 2026, ranking him 9th in Indonesia and 952nd in the world. WealthRank is not Forbes, uses its own methodology and update cadence, and its snapshot is eight months later than Forbes' December list. The two numbers are shown here as what each publisher separately reported, not as a before-and-after: comparing a Forbes figure against a different tracker's figure and calling the gap a change over time would misstate what actually happened.
Lim's fortune is split across three businesses, per Forbes' profile of him:
| Company | Sector | Listing | Lim family's stake |
|---|---|---|---|
Trimegah Bangun Persada (Harita Nickel, NCKL) | Nickel mining and processing | IDX, IPO 2023 | Controlling, via Harita Group |
| Cita Mineral Investindo | Bauxite mining | IDX | Majority |
| Bumitama Agri | Palm oil plantations | SGX (Singapore) | Majority |
Trimegah Bangun Persada, known commercially as Harita Nickel, runs nickel laterite mines and processing plants on Obi Island in North Maluku and raised $650 million in its 2023 initial public offering, per Forbes. Cita Mineral Investindo, the group's bauxite arm, is also listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange. Bumitama Agri, a palm oil producer with plantations in Kalimantan, trades on the Singapore exchange; Forbes describes the family's holding as a majority stake without stating a current exact percentage, and this article does not invent one.
Neither NCKL nor Cita Mineral Investindo appears in NetWort's own curated ticker universe as of this writing, and Bumitama Agri is a Singapore listing outside that universe entirely, so none of the three carries an internal link here.
Nickel is the more volatile of the two commodity legs, and it had a busy 2026. Indonesia's government cut 2026 mining production quotas (RKAB), and nickel's world price rose 17.27% to $18,643 per tonne by January 2026, per Katadata and CNBC Indonesia reporting at the time. Trimegah Bangun Persada's own stock hit an all-time high of Rp1,595 on 24 February 2026, and on 3 August 2026 the stock jumped 5.59% to Rp945 on its first trading day inside the LQ45 and IDX80 indices, both tracked by Kontan.
The underlying business kept pace: Trimegah Bangun Persada's first-half 2026 net profit attributable to owners rose 41.7% year on year, to Rp5.81 trillion from Rp4.10 trillion, on revenue up 21.3% to Rp17.10 trillion, per Katadata's reporting of the company's own results.
Three separate holding structures, spanning two stock exchanges and one wholly private layer on top of them, make this one of the harder fortunes in this series to price with confidence. Forbes and WealthRank disagree by about half a billion dollars on different dates, which is a modest gap by this series' standards, but the underlying reason is the same one that produces much wider gaps elsewhere: nobody outside the family has published the exact chain of ownership connecting Lim personally to each operating company.
There is also a generational wrinkle. His son, Lim Gunawan Hariyanto, has been CEO of Bumitama Agri since the company's founding in 1998 and now runs Harita Group's day-to-day operations as well, per Bumitama Agri's own leadership page and Wikipedia. A living handover of operating control, with the 97-year-old founder still holding the chairman's title, is a different shape from most of the succession stories in this series, which have followed a founder's death rather than run alongside a founder's life.
One more item worth recording for the sake of completeness, with no implication of wrongdoing by Lim Hariyanto himself: an OCCRP investigation, published 30 April 2025 with the Gecko Project, The Guardian, Deutsche Welle and KCIJ Newstapa, reported that Harita's own internal water monitoring at its Obi Island nickel operation had recorded chromium-6 contamination since 2012. Separately, Indonesia's Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) named Stevi Thomas, Harita Nickel's director of external relations, a suspect in December 2023 over a bribery case tied to former North Maluku governor Abdul Gani Kasuba's road-permit approvals; the Ternate corruption court sentenced Thomas to one year and ten months in prison on 16 May 2024, a matter now resolved and more than two years old. Neither report names Lim Hariyanto personally, and no charge, investigation or claim against him individually was found for this article.
A 97-year-old founder still holding a controlling stake across three companies is a reminder that "net worth" is a snapshot of an ownership structure, not a single bank balance, and that structure can keep generating disagreement between trackers for reasons that have nothing to do with the founder's health or intentions. If you are tracking a concentrated, multi-entity holding like this one in your own portfolio, the same lesson applies at any scale: a single stock price rarely tells you the whole story of what a stake is worth, and a family holding company layered on top adds a genuine, unresolved pricing question that even Forbes and WealthRank answer differently.
For more on how trackers build these estimates in the first place, and where nickel fits into the broader electric-vehicle supply chain story this series keeps returning to, see the profiles of two other Indonesian resource fortunes below.