Sydney Mining Club Lunchtime Forum
Nickel Mines - Dominant in World Nickel Production from Indonesia | The Unusual Aussie Company That Thrived Through the 2024 Nickel Price Crash.
At 12.15pm on the 7th of November at The Ivy, the Sydney Mining Club will host Managing Director of Nickel Industries, Justin Werner.
Nickel Industries (ASX: NIC)
Justin Werner
Managing Director
Nickel Industries is the world’s largest listed pure nickel producer, and an industry dark horse.
The company has been in Indonesia since 2008 and has controlling interests in the world-class Hengjaya nickel laterite mine in Sulawesi, feeding four rotary kiln electric furnaces producing nickel matte for electric vehicles and nickel pig iron for stainless-steel.
In the last half, Nickel Industries produced 68,000 tonnes of nickel and had an EBITDA of approx $200 million dollars. It’s been paying dividends and buying back its shares while the majority of Australia’s nickel mines going through shut down as nickel prices went into freefall earlier this year.
The survival of Nickel Industries was not a coincidence. The company operates at such scale that it consistently produces at the bottom end of the cost curve, allowing high profitability at a very low nickel price.
And this Sydney-based nickel dark horse has further plans to grow its mines and downstream processing capacity in Indonesia. It’s also forecasting that nickel prices have bottomed and will go up over the next few years.
Nickel Industries has been one of the biggest contributors to the boom in Indonesia’s nickel mining industry. A few years ago, Indonesia went from 7% of global nickel output. Last year Indonesia produced 55%, with some forecasts predicting this will reach 75% by 2030. Nickel laterites were once regarded as the dogs of the nickel business, remember the Murrin Murrin travails, but not so today. The revolution in infrastructure at Sulawesi’s Morowali centre is quite simply astonishing.
