Indonesia Wants To Be A Producer Of Stainless Steel And EV Battery From Downstreaming

Illustration. (Photo: Doc. Antara)

JAKARTA - Deputy for Strategic Downstreaming of the Ministry of Investment/BKPM Heldy Satrya Putera revealed that Indonesia is targeting the title as the two major world stainless steel producing countries and the top five world EV battery producing countries (electric vehicles) through nickel downstream.

In the webinar "Strategy to Achieve Investment Target 2023 by Encouraging Downstreaming" in Jakarta, Wednesday, March 19, Heldy said nickel downstreaming is indeed prioritized for two industries, namely as stainless steel, and the raw material industry for electric vehicle batteries.

"Nickel's priority is how to make stainless steel and batteries (EV). We have calculated how much added value is generated, how many global demand is there, investment needs, impacts on GDP, employment and exports that can be increased," he said, as reported by Antara.

In his presentation material, recorded for the stainless steel industry, the government is aiming for an additional value of up to 9.5 times with global demand in 2045 reaching up to 365 billion US dollars. Meanwhile, for the EV battery industry, the added value is estimated to reach 67 times with a potential global demand of 5.91 trillion US dollars.

On the other hand, nickel downstream for both sectors until 20240 has the potential investment value of 127.9 billion US dollars, contributing up to 43.2 billion US dollars to GDP, absorbing 357 thousand workers, and export potential of up to 81 billion US dollars.

Heldy explained that the high added value of downstreaming is one of the main considerations of the government to encourage nickel downstreaming.

Another consideration is that nickel itself is one of Indonesia's leading commodities. In fact, as many are said, Indonesia has the largest nickel reserves in the world that can actually be utilized domestically.

In addition, the very promising demand in the future is considered another consideration to continue to support the downstreaming of these mineral commodities.

Heldy explained that the downstream nickel that had been carried out had had a significant impact on the realization of investment in recent years.

He explained that investment realization in the basic metal industry and metal goods continued to increase after the policy of banning nickel exports and downstreaming.

In terms of exports, nickel downstream has managed to accelerate the performance of national exports from only US$3 billion in 2017 to US$29 billion in 2022 for exports of nickel downstream products.

"Now it is above 30 billion US dollars, meaning that our exports have increased more than 10 times from the results of downstream businesses," he said.