Indonesia to launch nickel, tin online tracking next week

JAKARTA (Reuters) -- Indonesia will launch an online tracking system next week for nickel and tin shipments to increase government revenue and improve mining governance, a deputy coordinating minister said on Thursday.

The tracking system to be launched on Monday, known as SIMBARA, was first implemented on coal in 2022 and the resource-rich country has planned to widen its implementation to other minerals it produces.

Indonesia is the world's biggest producer of nickel and one of its largest producers of tin. Using SIMBARA, the government would be able to track the nickel and tin from mines to domestic smelters.

"Smelting companies have to register where they buy the nickel from and where the mines are," Septian Hario Seto, deputy coordinating minister for maritime and investment affairs, said in an interview.

Smelters will not be allowed to unload ore shipments from mines that have not yet paid their royalties. The system successfully increased government revenue in the coal sector, Seto told Reuters, and hoped to see similar improvement in the nickel and tin sectors.

The SIMBARA system will also be linked to the government's digital records of mining quotas, known as RKAB. It enables miners to track how much production quota a miner has left for the period and to alert authorities should there be discrepancies in output and sales data, he added.

A senior official has said Jakarta will implement the system on other minerals such as bauxite and copper, but the timing would be decided later on, once the nickel and tin tracking system has run smoothly.