Malaysia, which was a top 10 supplier of bauxite to China, is expected to benefit after Indonesia announced a ban on bauxite exports from June 2023.
According to Indonesian customs data, China imports 17.8 million tons of bauxite from Indonesia in 2021, accounting for about 15% of total imports. According to Shanghai Nonferrous Metals, China will import 107.42 million tons of bauxite in 2021, of which 16.61% will come from Indonesia.
If one country (Indonesia) imposes a ban on bauxite exports, global demand will shift to any other country that can provide these resources,” said Nik Nazmi bin Nik Ahmad, Malaysia’s Minister of Natural Resources and Environmental Climate Change. In that case, demand for Malaysian bauxite would be high, especially from China.”
In 2019, Malaysia dropped to 18th place in the ranking of the world’s top 20 bauxite producing countries. This comes after Malaysia imposed a three-year mining ban from 2016 due to unregulated mining practices in the country’s eastern state of Pahang. The country’s bauxite production plummeted from 27.7 million tons in 2015 to just over 900,000 tons in 2019, while the size of exports fell from 3.5 million tons in 2015 to 912,000 tons in 2019, a drop of nearly 74%.
After the lifting of the mining ban in 2019, the Malaysian government began to implement new stringent regulations, such as reducing the area where mining activities can take place in Pahang state between June 2020 and May 2021, and requiring environmental impact assessments to be conducted, leading to a further contraction of Malaysia’s bauxite exports to nearly 228,000 tons in 2021.
Post time: Jan-03-2023