Low Tuck Kwong: the Indonesian mining billionaire who is benefitting from coal boom

A decade ago, the Indonesian mining billionaire Low Tuck Kwong was known mainly for his private zoo – a fabulous menagerie of peacocks, orangutans and Sumatran tigers, featuring zebra-hybrids known as “zonkeys” and the tycoon’s own “zorse”. To visiting journalists, he came across as a sort of Doctor Dolittle. In 2013, Forbes Asia reported the following exchange with a white cockatoo. “Assalamu alaikum,” said Low to the bird, which gave “a boisterous reply”. He then moved on to the turtle doves…

That year, Low’s business outlook seemed clouded, says The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Since buying his first coal mine in Borneo in 1997, he’d made a tidy fortune. Yet the days of King Coal looked numbered. Some experts concluded that 2013 would mark the peak for the dirtiest fossil fuel as advanced economies shuttered coal-fired power stations. What they didn’t predict was how forcefully a swathe of Asian emerging economies would pick up the slack. Coal is booming again, with consumption surpassing the eight-billion-ton level for three years in a row. And Indonesia, the world’s largest coal exporter, is “shipping more of it than any nation in history”.

Low’s Bayan Resources mining empire is at the heart of the boom: its Jakarta-listed shares have shot up by around 1,245% in five years, taking the “king of coal” from an also-ran on local rich lists to Indonesia’s fourth-richest person, worth some $27 billion in 2024. He is still scrambling to ride the coal rush by expanding and supercharging production. And nothing, it seems, is sacrosanct, says the WSJ. Even his “private zoo… needs to make way for the mining of the bounty buried beneath”.

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Low has enjoyed “a meteoric rise”, says The Diplomat. But he tends to keep a low profile – flashy he is not. He travels to his mining concessions in Kalimantan via helicopter, “yet carries his own bag” and wears the same pair of trainers “for a few days at a stretch”, notes the WSJ. An immigrant, who had to navigate the power structures of his adopted country, Low probably understands the value of anonymity. He rarely gives interviews and has never revealed much about his early life. Born in 1948 in Singapore, he worked at his father’s construction firm before migrating to Indonesia in 1972. After initially venturing into timber, he got into mining and established Bayan.

“Low’s operations got off to a lumpy start.” His first coal shipment in 1998 coincided with the ending of the three-decade reign of the Indonesian dictator Muhammad Suharto, and fear of “unrest” saw his Japanese buyer pull out. But Low emerged as a canny player in a volatile sector, steering the company through downturns even as he focused on expansion. The stickiest years, a decade ago – when loaded with debt he was advised there was no future in coal – miraculously came good when “instead of burying coal for good”, China resumed its “ravenous demand”. By 2018 Bayan was back in rude health. Logistics remain a problem: the company relies on rivers to transport its coal to the coast. After one lengthy dry period, executives “consulted a local shaman and gave an offering of eggs and bananas to a local river god”. Now it is building a five-mile-long “overland conveyor belt”.

Low Tuck Kwong branches out

Will the coal boom continue? Given its importance to energy-hungry Asian economies, you wouldn’t bet against it in the short-to-medium term. Still, Low, who transferred 22% of Bayan to his daughter Elaine last year, is hedging his bets, says Indonesia Business Post. Last year, he moved into palm oil and has land in Australia, where he has ventured into cattle ranching. His Singapore interests include the renewable-energy company Metis and The Farrer Park Company, a healthcare and hospitality complex. Expect to meet plenty of cockatoos.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors (BSME) editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.