Indonesian vs Vietnamese coconut charcoal: an origin comparison

By Mohamad Sinno, Charcoal Expert · Reviewed by Budi Hartanto, shipping specialist · 25 August 2026

Origin is a sourcing and shipping variable, not a quality guarantee. It changes who will carry your container, which trade statistics describe your supplier, and which paperwork your buyer will ask for. What it does not do is tell you what is in the box. That is settled by a certificate of analysis on the batch you are actually buying.

The short answer

We are an Indonesian factory, so read the next paragraph knowing that. The most recent peer-reviewed work on this question is not flattering to our origin: it finds Indonesian exports growing while Indonesian market share declines, and classes the competing origin as the one on the way up. We publish that because a page that hides its own weak evidence is worth nothing on the strong evidence either.

The practical differences are three, and none is a material property: carrier acceptance turns on the country of loading and cuts both ways, the trade data disagrees with itself depending which source you read, and the documentation question attached to origin is really a question about your destination.

What the trade data says, including the part against us

Every figure in this section is heading-wide. HS 4402 covers all wood charcoal, including agglomerated forms, and shisha briquettes are one part of it. No published series isolates our product from the rest of the heading, so a 4402 number describes a category this product sits inside — never this product alone. Read every figure below with that limit attached.

The substantive study is Faujan and Bacthtiar, Analysis of the Competitiveness and Export Performance of Indonesian Coconut Shell Charcoal Briquettes (HS 4402) in Saudi Arabia: RCA, EPD, and X-Model, in the International Journal of Economics and Management Research, volume 5 number 1, published 24 January 2026 (DOI 10.55606/ijemr.v5i1.730). It works from Trade Map data of 2024 vintage, over the period 2014 to 2023, and it measures one destination market only — Saudi Arabia, against four named competitors. That scope is a real limit: it is a large shisha market, and it is not the world.

Its two findings run in opposite directions. On comparative advantage the study puts Indonesia far ahead. On export performance it classes Indonesia a "Lost opportunity" — its own gloss is that exports are growing while market share is declining — and it identifies the competing origin as the only "Optimistic Market" in the set, on a "Rising star" trend. Both classifications come from the same paper, the same data and the same decade.

The comparative-advantage figures need one caveat we are not willing to leave in a footnote. The study's abstract and discussion give Indonesia an average RCA of 49.49; its own summary results table prints 49.07 on the same row. The competing origin is 13.97 consistently, and every classification above is consistent throughout. So the wobble sits precisely on the number most flattering to us, and we are not going to quietly pick the larger one.

Two dated conventions fill in the scale, and neither is a statistical authority. A trade blog reports a 9.7% decline in Indonesia's net export surplus from 2023 under competitive pricing pressure from Laos and Vietnam (a competitor supplier blog, published 13 May 2026, modified 14 July 2026; the figure carries no source or dataset on the page itself). And an Indonesian supplier's own article, published in February 2022 and last modified in January 2024, working from 2018 to 2020 figures attributed to Ministry of Foreign Affairs data, put the largest competitor at USD 68.44 million (hbnindonesia.co.id).

Origin decides who will carry it

This is the part of the origin decision with money in it, and almost nothing written about the question mentions it. Charcoal moves by sea only as declared dangerous goods, and carrier DG rules are written per country of loading. Our register audits thirteen ocean carriers. Three write an origin into the rule at all, and they point in three different directions. The other ten are origin-blind — accepting on documentation conditions, refusing fuel-grade charcoal wherever it loaded, or publishing nothing retrievable.

Ours is the prohibition, and it goes first. Ocean Network Express prohibits charcoal from Indonesia outright under UN 1361 — our origin, named in the rule, closed. That is a real cost of loading here and no amount of specification answers it. The next line runs the other way: Maersk's refusal of shisha, hookah and waterpipe charcoal names two other origins and does not name Indonesia, so the same cargo that ONE will not take is bookable there on Maersk's pre-audit conditions.

The full register, with every carrier's conditions, evidence class and verification date, is on which shipping lines accept charcoal, and the origin asymmetry above is set out on the carriers overview — that page carries the wording of the Maersk exclusion, which the register row does not.

One warning about how to use this. Exactly one carrier in the audited set names the competing origin in its own document — a fact about one carrier, not a pattern, and we hold no row recording what any other line does with charcoal loaded there. Nor is any of this a forecast: the rules are revised, ONE's own entry says to re-confirm before booking, and one of the three source documents carries no date at all. Check the verification dates, then ask the line.

The paperwork question is about your destination, not our origin

Buyers regularly arrive believing that origin selects the certificate of origin. It does not. Which preferential certificate applies is set by the agreement your buyer is claiming under at the destination — an Australian buyer claiming under the Indonesia–Australia CEPA, an Indian buyer under the ASEAN–India FTA, a UAE buyer under the Indonesia–UAE CEPA. Where no preference is claimed, Indonesia's non-preferential Form B is valid for every destination. The forms, the regulations behind them and the rule that the certificate has to reconcile with the rest of the container's file are on certificate of origin: which one your buyer needs.

A supplier in either country therefore faces the same documentary question, answered by where the goods are going rather than where they were made. Which agreement a particular shipment can qualify under, and what the origin-qualification test demands of it, belongs to your forwarder and your buyer's broker.

What origin does not settle

We have never tested a charcoal that was not ours. We hold no laboratory report on any other origin's product and will not imply one by publishing a comparison table with a second column in it. Any page showing paired ash or fixed-carbon figures for two countries is either citing somebody else's marketing or measuring one side and guessing the other.

The honest position is narrower and more useful. Country of manufacture is a label on a document: not a measurement, not a method, and not something that travels with a particular batch. Two producers in one country will differ from each other more than the two country averages do, and nothing about a flag tells you which one you are buying from.

When the numbers themselves disagree

Here is the strongest reason not to buy on origin statistics: the origin statistics do not agree with each other. Both of the following were fetched on 25 August 2026, and both claim to describe Indonesian coconut charcoal briquette exports.

• For 2018 they agree to the digit: USD 297.801 million in the supplier article, and the same 297.801 in the study's Trade Map series.
• For 2019 they differ by roughly a factor of two: USD 145.1 million in the supplier article, against a Trade Map series entry of about USD 280 million.

We cannot account for the difference. Neither source states what its figure covers precisely enough to reconcile them — one names Trade Map and the tariff heading but gives its table no destination qualifier; the other names a ministry with no dataset, no code and no locator. We will not speculate about which product scope, flow direction or reporting convention produced the gap, because neither document supports an answer. What we can record is that a buyer who reads one page and not the other comes away with a number twice the size, and will not know it.

Which is the whole point of the page. Origin statistics are heading-wide, source-dependent and, on this evidence, mutually inconsistent — so they cannot answer a procurement question. What answers it is the certificate of analysis on the batch you are buying. A COA is issued for every production batch; the issuing laboratory is PT Beckjorindo Paryaweksana; each coa states its own validity — 90 days from issue on current certificates; and a batch coa accompanies every sample. That document names a batch, a method and a laboratory. A country of origin names none of the three.

How to read one, and what to check on it before you wire money, is on certificates of analysis, and the parameters themselves are defined on our specifications reference.