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PT Bumi Resources Tbk
Bumi Resources is an Indonesian mining company that digs up and sells thermal coal, and also explores for oil, gas, and gold.
Bumi Resources is one of Indonesia's biggest coal miners. It pulls thermal coal out of the ground and sells it, mostly to power plants that burn it to make electricity. Thermal coal is the cheap, dirty fuel that still keeps a lot of Asia's lights on, especially in China, India, and nearby countries. Bumi digs it up in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo, and ships it out by the boatload.
The company's main money-maker is that coal. It owns mines through subsidiaries, and the coal gets sold on long-term contracts and on the spot market to utilities and trading houses. Coal prices swing hard, so Bumi's profits swing hard too. When coal is expensive, the company gushes cash. When it's cheap, the same mines can struggle to cover their costs. That whiplash is the core fact of life for a coal miner. Bumi also has a smaller, more speculative side: it explores for oil, gas, and gold in Indonesia. Those are bets on future finds rather than big current earners, and they add a bit of diversification to a business that is otherwise a pure coal play. The company's history is messy — it was once called PT Bumi Modern Tbk, and it has been through debt restructurings and ownership fights that made headlines in Indonesia. For a coal miner, though, the story always comes back to the same thing: how much coal it can dig up, and what price the world will pay for it.
The simple way to think about Bumi is this: it is a price-taker in a commodity business. It does not set the price of coal; the global market does. Its job is to keep its mines running efficiently and its costs low enough to survive the bad years so it can profit in the good ones. That makes it a cyclical, somewhat risky business tied closely to how much coal the world keeps burning.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026