Good News For Coal And CPO Entrepreneurs, Commodity Prices Will Still Be High Until 2023

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JAKARTA – The movement of commodity prices is currently in a high trend and is expected to continue until 2023. The projection was conveyed by the Chief Economist of PT Bank Mandiri (Persero) Tbk Andry Asmoro to reporters in a virtual discussion session.

"The positive impact of the war in Ukraine is that it gives a fairly good increase in commodity prices, that prices will still be high," he was quoted as saying Thursday, June 23.

According to Andry, this signal is a breath of fresh air for Indonesia. The reason is, RI is one of the world's important commodity producers through coal and palm oil or crude palm oil (CPO).

He did not rule out the possibility of price weakening in the near future. Even so, Andry is optimistic that the selling price of commodities is still at an upper level, considering that the price baseline is still far from normal conditions.

"Indeed, we see that there is a potential for commodity prices to swell, but when compared to the breakeven price, the gap is still quite wide," he said.

Based on information compiled by the editors, world coal commodity prices are recorded to be approaching the psychological level of 400 US dollars per tonne. In fact, the price of black gold before the pandemic in December 2019 was only in the range of 60-70 US dollars per ton.

Likewise, CPO has now shot up to around 4,900 Malaysian ringgits from the previous level of 2,000 Malaysian ringgits during the pre-pandemic.

"Well, this is of course still positive for Indonesia (in terms of income), because the impact could be within the next 1-2 years," concluded Andry.