The archipelago sets the price of half the nickel on earth.

Indonesia produces roughly three-fifths of the world's palm oil, out of Riau, North Sumatra and both Kalimantans. It is the country's other number one position, and like nickel it is managed with export policy rather than left to the market.

The instruments are an export levy and a duty that step with the government reference price, plus a domestic market obligation on cooking oil introduced after the 2022 export ban. A CPO position here is a policy position: the levy schedule can move the delivered economics between contract and shipment, in a direction nobody hedged.

Certification runs on two tracks. ISPO is mandatory under Indonesian law and RSPO is voluntary and buyer-driven. Neither substitutes for the plot-level geolocation and due diligence statement the European Union now requires, which is why traceability is recorded at the mill and the estate rather than asserted on a certificate.

The rest of the agricultural book here is smaller and more fragmented: robusta from Lampung, arabica from Gayo and Toraja, cocoa out of Sulawesi where the country now grinds more than it exports as beans, and natural rubber from Sumatra and Kalimantan. Rice is not an export story — Indonesia is a net importer, and we do not present it as anything else.

Indonesian copper is two mines and one undeveloped deposit. There is no long tail, which means a single permit decision or a single smelter outage moves the entire country's export volume.

Grasberg holds the largest gold reserve of any mine in the world and sits in the top three for copper. The open pit ended in 2019 and the operation is now block-cave underground — a mining method that takes a decade to establish and cannot be turned up in response to price.

Concentrate export is the live commercial question. Freeport's Manyar smelter at Gresik and Amman's smelter at Batu Hijau were built to end concentrate exports entirely, and the permits that allow any concentrate to leave have been extended case by case around their commissioning. Anyone quoting Indonesian concentrate is quoting a regulatory position as much as a tonnage.

Indonesia became the world's second-largest cobalt producer without opening a cobalt mine. It arrives as a by-product in the mixed hydroxide precipitate the HPAL plants produce alongside nickel, where cobalt content is a payable line in the contract rather than a separate cargo. Any exposure to Indonesian cobalt is exposure to Indonesian nickel with a second payable attached.

Rare earths are the more interesting and less developed question. The tin tailings of Bangka-Belitung carry monazite and xenotime, both already moving through the alluvial concentrate stream the dredges handle. Monazite holds the light rare earths — cerium, lanthanum, praseodymium and neodymium. Xenotime holds the heavies, including yttrium and dysprosium.

Neodymium is the magnet metal: NdFeB magnets are what make a traction motor or a direct-drive turbine small enough to be worth building. Dysprosium is added at low single-digit percentages to hold coercivity at operating temperature, without which the magnet weakens as the motor heats. Dysprosium is the scarcer and far more strategically exposed of the two, and today it comes overwhelmingly from ion-adsorption clays in southern China and Myanmar.

The constraint in Indonesia is not the ore. It is separation. Splitting individual rare earth oxides takes solvent extraction cascades running to hundreds of stages, and that capacity is almost entirely Chinese. Monazite also carries thorium, so it is regulated as radioactive material under the nuclear regulator in addition to mining law — a licensing path most traders have never walked, and the practical reason stockpiled monazite has sat unprocessed.

We say plainly what this is: an origination position worth holding a relationship for, not a book we are currently trading. Lithium and tungsten are not Indonesian stories at any meaningful scale, and we do not present them as such. The lithium in the battery parks here is imported.