Indonesia sits on 42 percent of the world's known nickel reserves. For most of its modern history, it exported that nickel as raw ore, receiving raw material prices while the value-added processing — refining, alloying, battery precursor chemistry — occurred in China, Japan, and South Korea. In 2020, the government of President Joko Widodo decided that arrangement was over.

The nickel ore export ban, challenged at the World Trade Organization by the European Union and subsequently upheld in a ruling that Indonesia is contesting, has had the economic effect its architects intended. Foreign investment in Indonesian nickel processing has exceeded USD 30 billion since 2020, with Chinese, South Korean, and increasingly American battery manufacturers building refinery and precursor production capacity that would otherwise have been located elsewhere. The Morowali Industrial Park in Central Sulawesi, which processed 400,000 tonnes of nickel in 2025, is now the world's largest integrated nickel processing complex.

The downstream ambition extends beyond refining. Indonesia's Battery National Corporation, a state enterprise established in 2021, has signed joint venture agreements with CATL, LG Energy Solution, and Panasonic to produce finished battery cells domestically — a step up the value chain that would make Indonesia a producer of components rather than merely materials.

The strategy carries risks that its architects acknowledge. WTO dispute outcomes, shifts in battery chemistry away from nickel toward lithium iron phosphate, and the environmental costs of rapid smelter expansion in Sulawesi are all live concerns. But the economic logic of capturing more value from finite resources before they are exhausted has proved difficult to argue against.

"Every tonne of nickel we process domestically is a job that used to exist somewhere else," said Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Airlangga Hartarto. "We are simply keeping what was always ours."