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

Low Tuck Kwong’s coal business was in deep trouble a decade ago, loaded down with debt in an industry he was assured had no future. Now, he is riding the waves of a global 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”.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors 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.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.