NIC is positioned really well in terms of production costs, right down the bottom of the histogram. From the perspective of earnings forecasts alone, I agree that it certainly looks cheap at today's prices
assuming business as usual continues to chug along.
However, there's some big risks hanging over NIC which might disrupt business as usual, and which will hold the share price down. The first is political - many Indonesians think (correctly) that China captures the lion's share of the IMIP profits, and would love to see the government hit its margins. Not just the populists but very level headed commentators - last week Faisal Basri was on Gita Wirjawan's podcast (you can think of them as two leading public intellectuals) and called IMIP a "leakage" in the national economy which had to be plugged because Chinese companies were making such ridiculous profits. Link is here if you speak Indonesian (www.youtube.com/watch?v=52JHSp4HGYg @ 1:04:28). Jokowi was chomping at the bit to hit NPI with an export tax earlier in the year, and a more populist leader would have rousing domestic support if they indeed followed through. Who's to say if anything will ultimately come of it... but certainly the stock price will adjust down for the risk.
Second is Tsingshan's short. They only closed 60k tonnes of their 200k tonne position. 140k tonnes open is still huge, and they probably won't be able to phone a friend and have the LME shut down so easily if the trade goes against them again a second time around. S&P Global warned of the potential for another LME nickel squeeze last week (
https://www.spglobal.com/commodity-insights/en/market-insights/latest-news/energy-transition/033122-nickel-market-remains-at-risk-of-further-short-squeezes-s-p-global) and Moody's had a lot of questions about Tsingshan's ability to pay if that happened, and hit NIC with an outlook downgrade as a result (
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nickel-mines-limited-moodys-changes-055806247.html). Severe financial trouble at Tsingshan would send NIC share price down the toilet - the news of the short alone sent the NIC stock price down like 30% in a few days. Again, hard to gauge probability - but certainly not a non-zero risk.
All up, NIC is only cheap today
if none of the above materialise, so I think of it as a medium+ risk trade. Good to remember that prior to 2014, NIC was an ore exporting operation with excellent profit forecasts that stretched out to the horizon, until a no-notice enactment of a 5 year old Indonesian law banning direct ore shipments blew up their business model overnight. Indonesian laws still change on a dime and what's "rock solid" today could be different next month...
(20min delay)