Competition
Figures converted from IDR at historical FX rates — see data/company.json.fx_rates. Ratios, margins, and multiples are unitless and unchanged.
The contested ground
Harita Nickel sells four things, and each one meets a different set of rivals. Laterite ore — 30.59 million wet tonnes of it in 2025, split 12.09 million wmt saprolite and 18.50 million wmt limonite — never reaches an outside buyer: the Group states in its own accounts that it "exclusively sells nickel ore to related parties for further processing" [1]. Ferronickel from three RKEF smelters with roughly 240,000 tonnes a year of installed nickel-in-FeNi capacity goes to stainless-steel mills. Mixed hydroxide precipitate and nickel sulphate from two HPAL refineries with roughly 120,000 tonnes a year of nickel-cobalt compound capacity go to the battery chain [2]. An industrial estate on Obi Island houses the whole thing.
The evidence base for this tab has an unusual shape. Harita's own filings name no competitor — not Vale Indonesia, not Aneka Tambang, not Weda Bay, not Tsingshan. The word "competitive" appears in its marketing section as a description of its own pricing posture, not as a map of who it is pricing against [3]. So the rival record here is built almost entirely from the rivals' own annual reports: PT Merdeka Battery Materials (MBMA), Nickel Industries Limited (NIC), Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt (603799) and Eramet SA. Two names in the staged peer set — PT Vale Indonesia and PT Aneka Tambang — have no documents in this corpus, so they appear below only where a rival's filing describes them. The arena's structure and cycle belong to Industry; the full source shelf, including the peer passages reproduced as filed, sits in Competitors.
Sources: Harita FY2025 Annual Report, Operational Performance Review [2]; MBMA FY2025 Annual Report, Manufacturing Assets [4]; Nickel Industries FY2025 Annual Report, Review of Operations [5]; Huayou FY2025 Annual Report, Business Review [6]; Eramet 2024 Universal Registration Document, Nickel Activity [7].
The comparator set
Four rivals were confirmed against their own filings rather than accepted from the screen.
MBMA is the closest structural analogue: an IDX-listed group running a laterite mine (SCM, 51% held, 21,100 hectares), RKEF smelters at IMIP and an HPAL-to-MHP build-out, all under the same Indonesian permitting regime [8].
Nickel Industries is ASX-listed but wholly Indonesia-operating, and runs the same product straddle: RKEF nickel units plus a growing HPAL position, fed by its own mine. It describes itself as "a globally significant, low-cost producer of nickel pig iron (NPI)" that has "acquired interests in high pressure acid leach (HPAL) projects, producing mixed hydroxide precipitate (MHP) for use in the electric vehicle (EV) supply chain" [5]. It is by some margin the most disclosure-rich comparator.
Huayou Cobalt operates the largest Indonesian HPAL position, Huayue and Huafei, and is also the refiner and cathode-maker at the far end of the chain. It is a like-for-like rival only in nickel: the group also sells cobalt, copper, lithium, precursors and cathode materials, and reported nickel product revenue of RMB 25,895m and nickel intermediate revenue of RMB 11,781m out of RMB 81,019m total in 2025 [9].
Eramet is a partner, not an operator: it holds 38.7% indirectly in PT Weda Bay Nickel and takes an offtake of the NPI plant's output. Its economics are diluted by manganese, mineral sands and lithium, so only the nickel activity is used here, and even that is reported on an adjusted basis that folds in its share of an equity-accounted joint venture [10].
Huayou and Eramet run models different enough to keep out of like-for-like economics: Huayou is a diversified battery-materials group whose Indonesian nickel plants are one input among many, and Eramet consolidates none of Weda Bay.
Indonesia is the arena
Every rival above competes in one country, and the country's weight has roughly doubled in five years. Eramet's registration document reproduces the INSG country tables: Indonesian ore production rose from 767.0 thousand tonnes of nickel content in 2020 to 2,328.0 in 2024 against a world total of 3,776.4, and Indonesian finished primary nickel rose from 606.2 to 1,779.8 thousand tonnes against a world total of 3,392.7 [11].
Source: derived from the INSG ore-production table and the Eramet finished-products table, Eramet 2024 Universal Registration Document [11].
The same document draws the line that separates Harita's two product families. Class 1, pure metal and the sulphates made from intermediates, was "around 26% of total primary nickel production" in 2024; Class 2 ferroalloys, NPI and ferronickel, "around 74%". Within Class 1, HPAL in Indonesia produced 350 kt of MHP in 2024 against 140 kt of nickel matte, and "these two intermediates are mainly refined in China" [12]. Eramet also names the dominant Class 2 player, and it is not a listed company: "NPI represents approximately 90% of Class 2 nickel, and our partner Tsingshan at PT Weda Bay Nickel is the leading player in this market" [13].
Scale and profit, side by side
Peer financial series are not available in this run's structured data — its own coverage note records zero of six peers loaded — so the figures below come from each rival's audited statements, in the currency that rival reports.
Sources: Harita FY2025 Annual Report, Note 37 Segment Information [14]; MBMA FY2025 Annual Report, Financial Highlights [15]; Nickel Industries FY2025 Annual Report, Note 24 Segment Information [16] and Review of Operations [5]; Huayou FY2025 Annual Report, Major Accounting Data [17]; Eramet 2024 Universal Registration Document, Nickel Activity Key Figures [10].
Currencies and consolidation perimeters differ, so the table records levels rather than a ranking. What it shows without ambiguity is that in 2025 the three Indonesia-centred producers moved in different directions. Harita's revenue rose 9.9% and profit for the year rose 42.2%; MBMA's revenue fell 22.2% while profit rose 26.4%; Nickel Industries' revenue fell 5.5% and its loss narrowed from $189.8m to $41.2m. Harita's reported profit also carries a large equity-accounted component: $245.4 million of share in associates' profit in 2025 against $124.8 million in 2024, from HPL, ONC and KPS, none of which it consolidates [18].
Where the margin sits in the chain
Three of the four rivals publish segment splits, and each one puts the margin in the same place: the mine, not the smelter.
Sources: derived from Harita FY2025 Annual Report, Note 37 Segment Information [14] and [19]; Nickel Industries FY2025 Annual Report, Note 24 Segment Information [16] and [20]; MBMA FY2025 Annual Report, Segment Performance [8].
The three measures are not the same measure. Harita reports gross profit by segment, Nickel Industries reports adjusted EBITDA by segment, and MBMA reports profit for the year by segment, a figure struck after depreciation, interest and tax. The comparison is therefore between shapes, not levels: in each of the three, the mining segment earns a multiple of the processing segment's margin on the same revenue. Harita's management said as much when asked directly, noting that "in percentage terms, the margin of the nickel mining segment is indeed higher than that of the nickel processing segment, given the relatively lower production costs in the mining segment", while adding that in nominal terms mining remains the smaller contributor because "the selling price per ton of nickel ore is significantly lower than the selling price of nickel processing products" [21].
The volume race
Harita's ore book has quadrupled in four years, and it moved because its own downstream plants asked for more feed.
Sources: Harita FY2023 Annual Report, Operational Performance Review [22]; FY2024 Annual Report, Board of Directors Report [23]; FY2025 Annual Report, Operational Performance Review [24].
Sources: Harita FY2024 Annual Report, Operational Performance Review [25]; FY2025 Annual Report, Operational Performance Review [24] and [26].
Against that ramp, the two listed Indonesian RKEF rivals went backwards in 2025. Nickel Industries produced a record 1,055,658 tonnes of NPI but only 124,966 tonnes of contained nickel, below 2024's 127,261 tonnes because ore grade fell from 12.2% to 11.8% [27]. MBMA produced 73,871 tonnes of nickel in NPI and LGNM against 82,161 in 2024, after taking smelters down for scheduled maintenance and revising NPI guidance to 70,000–80,000 tonnes [4].
Sources: Harita FY2025 Annual Report, Operational Performance Review [24]; Nickel Industries FY2025 Annual Report, RKEF Operations [27]; MBMA FY2025 Annual Report, Manufacturing Assets [4] and FY2024 Annual Report, Manufacturing Assets [28].
Harita's FeNi is not the same product as its rivals' NPI — ferronickel carries a higher nickel grade — so the chart compares contained nickel units competing for the same stainless-steel demand, not identical goods.
Intermediates and the MHP supply base
The HPAL side is where capacity is being added fastest, and where the disclosures overlap in a way that makes double-counting easy.
Sources: Harita FY2025 Annual Report, Operational Performance Review [24] and [26]; Nickel Industries FY2025 Annual Report, HPAL Operations [29]; MBMA FY2025 Annual Report, President Director Report [30]; Huayou FY2025 Annual Report, Business Review [6] and FY2024 Annual Report, Business Review [31]; Eramet 2024 Universal Registration Document, Nickel Activity [7].
Two cautions the table cannot carry. Huayue appears twice in the public record — Huayou consolidates it, and Nickel Industries reports its own 10% share of the same plant — so adding the two disclosures together counts the same tonnes twice. And Huayou's 235,000-tonne 2025 MHP shipment figure is not stated on the same basis as its predecessor: the prior-year report gave "the shipment of nickel intermediates was nearly 230,000t", a wider product label, so the two years are not a clean like-for-like [6] [31].
Set against 350 kt of Indonesian MHP produced in 2024 on Eramet's count [12], the named nameplate already running or under construction in the table above adds several hundred thousand tonnes more. No participant in this corpus publishes a market share for MHP, and none is calculated here.
The ore book
Ore is where the rivals meet most directly, because four of them mine laterite in the same country under the same annual quota.
Sources: Harita FY2024 Annual Report, Board of Directors Report [23] and FY2025 Annual Report, Operational Performance Review [24]; Eramet 2024 Universal Registration Document, Weda Bay operational indicators [7]; MBMA FY2024 Annual Report, Mining Segment [32] and FY2025 Annual Report, Comparison of Target and Realisation [33] and Mining Segment Production and Sales [34]; Nickel Industries FY2025 Annual Report, Mining Operations [35].
Weda Bay's 2024 figure is at 100% of a mine Eramet does not consolidate, and its 2025 line is a permit ceiling rather than a realised volume: Eramet stated that production and sales "will be limited to 32 Mwmt in 2025 (including 3 Mwmt internally to the NPI plant)" [7]. On the record as filed, Harita's own ore volume passed Weda Bay's 2024 external sales during 2025, and it did so without selling a tonne to a third party.
Cost and price lines rivals publish
Harita publishes no cash cost. Its FY2025 annual report describes "the Company's position as a nickel producer with competitive cash costs among industry peers" [2], and management repeated the claim at the 2025 public expose while describing efficiency work including a captive quicklime plant, PT CKM, because to date "we buy the quicklime from the external party at a higher cost" [36]. Harita's record contains one quantified cost placement, and it is third-party and three years old: the IPO prospectus cites AME placing the Stage I HPAL Project's estimated 2022 cash cost at the lower end of the first quartile of the 2022 global nickel smelter cash-cost curve [37]. Two rivals publish current numbers.
Sources: Nickel Industries FY2025 Annual Report, RKEF Operations [27], HPAL Operations [29] and Mining Operations [35]; MBMA FY2025 Annual Report, Manufacturing Assets [4] and Mining Segment Production and Sales [34]; Harita blended ore price derived from FY2025 Annual Report, Note 37 Segment Information [14] and Operational Performance Review [24].
The cost definitions are each company's own and are not reconciled to one another: MBMA defines RKEF cash cost as direct cost per tonne of nickel produced including transport, and Nickel Industries reports cash costs excluding by-product credits. Peer figures stay in the currency each rival reports; Harita's derived ore price is converted from rupiah at the period-end rate, so it carries an exchange-rate effect the peer rows do not. The cross-cutting fact is the spread. On Nickel Industries' 2025 figures the RKEF line earned roughly $1,100 per tonne of nickel between cash cost and realised price, while the HPAL line earned roughly $7,200 — a gap the company attributes in part to a cobalt credit of about $1,900 per tonne of nickel and to MHP contract prices rising 8% to $14,990/t Ni [29].
Ore pricing moved in two directions at once
The clearest disclosed price movement in the peer set is the divergence between the two ore types Harita sells.
Source: Nickel Industries FY2025 Annual Report, Mining Operations [35].
Nickel Industries attributes the split to two different forces: "the saprolite contract price decreased 30%, driven by a reduction in the local premium", while "the limonite contract price increased 31% due to the increased demand for limonite ore from Indonesian HPAL projects" [35]. Harita's own 2025 mix shifted the same way, limonite growing to 18.50 million wmt to feed a full year of PT ONC and saprolite to 12.09 million wmt to feed the new PT KPS lines [24]. Because it sells only within its own group, none of that limonite premium is struck at a third-party price.
The two mines that do sell ore externally realised very different limonite prices in 2025: $23.6/wmt at Hengjaya against $15.3/wmt at SCM [35] [34]. Both are struck off the same government HPM benchmark; grade, moisture and haulage distance account for the rest, and neither company reconciles the two.
The quota that binds everyone
The one constraint every rival in this corpus names is the RKAB, Indonesia's annual work-plan-and-budget approval. Its bite is documented, not hypothetical.
During the year, the Company experienced substantial downtime and $21.3 million in standby charges at the Hengjaya Mine as the RKAB extension was not granted until 12 December 2025 and consequently the Adjusted EBITDA decreased from $100.9m in 2024 to $91.6m in 2025.
— Nickel Industries, FY2025 annual report [35]
Eramet recorded the same mechanism a year earlier, reporting that "PT WBN's mining operations were constrained by the RKAB granted by the Ministry of Mines, limiting annual production and sales for the 2024-2026 period", with external sales down 9% and the mine benefitting from high-grade premiums "close to 50%" in the fourth quarter as domestic supply tightened [7].
Huayou, a buyer rather than a miner, states the consequence at the level of the world price: "At the end of the year, it rebounded significantly under the expectation of the tightening of Indonesia's RKAB quota policy. From the supply side, global nickel production was highly concentrated in Indonesia. Its policy trends such as the RKAB quota have become key variables affecting the global nickel supply and demand balance" [38]. Harita's account of the same quarter is consistent: prices peaked at $16,066 per MT in March 2025, weakened through November, and recovered to about $14,884 per MT in December as quota-adjustment talk began to move expectations [39].
Rivals on the record
In date order, the peer filings describe a market that added supply faster than it added demand.
MBMA, FY2025 annual report. "In 2025, the global nickel market was dominated by a surge in production, particularly from Indonesia and China, resulting in a significant surplus. Although demand for stainless steel and EV batteries continued to grow, the increase in demand was not proportional to the rise in supply, leading to downward pressure on nickel commodity prices throughout the year" [40].
Huayou, FY2025 annual report. "According to INSG, the global nickel supply was 3.81 million tons and the demand 3.6 million tons in 2025" — a surplus of roughly 210,000 tonnes, with prices "mainly fluctuating within the bottom range" [38].
Huayou on its Indonesian build. "The two HPAL projects, Huayue and Huafei, maintained stable and exceeded production capacity, achieving an annual MHP shipment of 235,000 tons, a 30% increase compared to the same period of the previous year. The Pomalaa HPAL project with an annual output of 120,000 tons of nickel metal progressed steadily as planned". The same passage records a whole-chain agreement with ANTAM and IBC, one of the few places a Harita rival names an Indonesian state producer as a partner rather than a competitor [6].
MBMA on its own HPAL start. "During 2025, PT ESG produced 25,994 tons of nickel in MHP" after receiving its industrial licence in February 2025, with MNEM running at 25,000 tonnes a year and SLNC "with a planned capacity of 90,000 tons of nickel in MHP per year, was currently under construction and targeted to begin operations in 2026" [30].
Eramet on where the ore goes. Weda Bay is "positioned in the first quartile of the cost curve" and supplies saprolite and laterite ore to local Class 1 and Class 2 nickel producers, with an ambition agreed with Tsingshan to raise the mine toward roughly 60 Mwmt a year [41]. The first-quartile claim is Eramet's own positioning statement, unquantified in the document.
Harita's counterpart commentary defends the nickel-battery chemistry rather than its own position. Asked at the 2026 public expose why investors should expect MHP demand to absorb Indonesia's HPAL build-out when LFP holds about 80% of Chinese EV battery installations, management argued that "these two battery types essentially serve distinct market segments", with nickel-based cells in longer-range mid-to-upper-class vehicles in Europe and the United States, and added a recycling argument: used NCM batteries "can be reprocessed into black mass or black powder for further processing into nickel sulfate" [42].
The sales book and its concentration
Harita's processing revenue has gone to a very small number of buyers since before the IPO, and one of them is also its joint-venture partner.
Sources: Harita FY2022 Annual Report, Note 26 Revenue from Contracts with Customers [43]; FY2024 Annual Report, Note 30 [44]; FY2025 Annual Report, Note 29 [45].
In FY2024 the three named buyers — Lygend Resources and Technology, Ningbo Lygend Wisdom and Glencore International — took $1,436.2 million, exactly the whole of the nickel processing segment's external revenue, or 85.90% of group revenue [44]. In FY2025 the same three took $1,258.5 million, or 70.78% of group revenue, against processing revenue of $1,347.3 million — the first year in the disclosed record in which buyers outside the named three account for a measurable slice of processed-product sales [45]. Within the three, the mix moved: Glencore rose from 11.27% to 19.02% of group revenue while Ningbo Lygend Wisdom fell from 22.52% to 6.92%.
The counterparty relationship runs both ways. Lygend is not only Harita's largest customer but its joint-venture partner across the downstream: the IPO prospectus records a 45.10% Harita interest in HPL, a Lygend subsidiary, and names Lygend as the main ferronickel customer under an offtake agreement with MSP [46].
Switching terms in the contracts
The prospectus is the only place in this corpus where contract duration, minimum volume, pricing formula and renewal are set out. What it describes is a chain of long-dated, priority-right agreements between parties that also own each other.
Sources: Harita IPO Prospectus 2023, Customers of the Mining Business [47]; Other Material Agreements [48] and [49].
Three features of that table govern how easily anything in Harita's chain could be replaced.
First, price is not negotiated. Ore transferred to MSP, HJF and HPL is priced off the government's mandatory minimum reference price, adjusted by formula for nickel grade and a product correction factor [50]. The same benchmark sets MBMA's ore realisations and Hengjaya's contract prices [34]. Competition on ore price is therefore bounded by regulation for every Indonesian participant; the variance shows up in grade, moisture, haulage and local premium.
Second, duration is long and the dates are known. The HPL ore supply runs to 31 December 2030 and the HJF supply to December 2032, both with minimum annual quantities [47]. The prospectus ties the first of these to the mine plan, noting that limonite stockpile reclamation is expected to continue to 2038 while the HPL supply agreement runs to December 2030 [37]. The ferronickel offtake runs 60 months with 24-month extensions available by consent and no cap on how many times.
Third, the shareholder agreements convert commercial preference into a standing right. In each of the KPS, ONC, HJF, OSS and DCM joint ventures, the shareholders agreed to give priority to Harita or its affiliates to supply ore, and the shareholders hold first priority to buy the plant's output. Those agreements remain in force until they are terminated by agreement of the parties, until all shares held by the relevant shareholders transfer to a third party, or until a binding order is made to wind the joint venture up [48].
The visible contrast in the peer set is how quickly an ore contract can stop when the quota moves. Nickel Industries disclosed that its subsidiary supplied limonite to a third-party trader "pursuant to a sales contract providing for the delivery of 850,000 wmt of limonite ore per month for the period from January to September 2025. No deliveries were made from October 2025 as the contract could not be continued due to limitations under the approved RKAB", and that supply resumed in December under a new contract at 250,000 wmt per month [51]. Its internal saprolite flows, by contrast, run "under a series of oftake agreements to supply between 80,000 to 100,000 wmt per month to each entity" — the same captive structure Harita uses [51].
Payment terms on Harita's processed sales are short, with no long-dated receivable lock: "The term of payment is generally due within 1 to 35 days upon fulfillment of the performance obligation. For export sales, the Group requires payment against the presentation of documents of title" [45].
What the record does not contain
Four gaps limit what can be drawn from the evidence above, and each is a gap in the filings rather than in the search.
Harita publishes no cash cost per tonne on any current definition, so its repeated low-cost-producer positioning [36] cannot be checked against the rival cost lines above. It also states plainly that it withholds targets: "Given the highly competitive market environment, the Company does not publicly disclose its financial targets" [52].
No participant publishes a market share for MHP, for ferronickel, or for Indonesian ore, and the two share claims that do appear in the peer set disagree with each other and with the INSG tables. MBMA's industry overview carries both "more than one-third of the global nickel supply" and "around 50% of total global nickel output" on the same page [53], against Eramet's INSG-sourced 62% of ore and 52% of finished primary nickel for 2024 [11].
The two Indonesian rivals with the closest ore-and-ferronickel overlap, PT Vale Indonesia and PT Aneka Tambang, have no documents in this corpus. They appear only at second hand, in Huayou's account of its whole-chain agreement with ANTAM and IBC [6].
And the associates that generate a third of Harita's pre-tax profit — HPL, ONC and KPS — publish no standalone accounts here. Their contribution is visible only as an equity-method line: $138.4 million from HPL, $87.8 million from ONC and $18.7 million from KPS in 2025 [18]. Nickel Industries' disclosure of the Huayue plant's cash cost, realised price and cobalt credit [29] is the closest available proxy for what sits inside that line.