Provisional data released by the Ministry of Trade on Friday indicated another fall in exports of refined tin from Indonesia in June. 5,461 tonnes of refined tin valued at $116.8 million was checked by official surveyors ready for export last month, according to the ministry. This compares with 7,150 tonnes in May and 10,684 tonnes in June 2007. The decline was attributed to rising production costs and increased competition for tin ore.
Output at smelters in Bangka “slowed down probably because of higher costs after the fuel price increase,” Abrun Abubakar, corporate secretary of PT Timah, Indonesia’s largest tin producer, told Bloomberg. “There’s also stiffer competition among smelters to get ores”.
An official in the main tin-producing region area told Reuters that higher fuel and ore costs had hurt production. Small independent smelters in the tin-producing Bangka-Belitung islands have been operating at about 60-70 percent of capacity following a surge in the price of tin ore, said Ismiyardi, commissioner of PT Bangka-Belitung Timah Sejahtera, a consortium of seven smelters. “We just wait and see because tin prices are still volatile. We don’t dare to buy too much raw material as it is still expensive,” he said.
Indonesia raised fuel prices by an average of nearly 30 percent in May, which has reportedly prompted small tin miners to slow mining activity, curbing raw material supply.
