Where Indonesian charcoal goes: top destination markets by the numbers

By Mohamad Sinno, Charcoal Expert · 27 August 2026 · Reviewed by Budi Dharmawan, Head of QC, 4 September 2026

Every supplier site carries a list of the countries Indonesia sells charcoal to. Almost none says where the list came from or what year it describes. Here is the same information with both attached — and a warning about what it is a list of. For the national totals this ranking sits inside, see the industry data digest.

The short answer, with its vintage

The most widely repeated ranking traces to a Ministry of Trade report covering 2018, which put the five largest destinations for Indonesian charcoal at Japan (USD 132.19 million), Germany (USD 129.10 million), South Korea (USD 125.42 million), China (USD 87.80 million) and the United States (USD 70.14 million). Those figures are eight years old. They are reported by HBN Indonesia (published February 2022, updated January 2024), which also cites Ministry of Foreign Affairs data showing total coconut charcoal briquette exports rising 4.64% from USD 145.1 million in 2019 to USD 151.9 million in 2020, and puts Indonesia's share of world coconut charcoal exports at 22.42% in 2018.

A more recent list, though from trade-blog rather than ministry sourcing, names Indonesia's primary export destinations as Japan, China, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (a competitor supplier blog, published May 2026, updated 26 August 2026). Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands appear there and not in the 2018 ministry five. Whether that is real movement or a difference in what each source counted is not something either source lets you settle.

The ranking table

The China growth figure comes from a different source and a different year, and is included to show what a populated cell costs: Vietnam Charcoal reports Chinese charcoal exports falling 45.7% in 2024 to roughly USD 80 million, and the Philippines exporting approximately USD 84 million in 2024, driven primarily by coconut shell charcoal (Vietnam Charcoal, March 2026). Those are exporter figures, not Indonesian destination figures. Putting them in the same table without saying so is how most destination lists on the web come to be wrong.

Read the heading before you read the list

Now look at the top of that table again. Japan, Germany, South Korea. Those are hardwood and barbecue markets. They are not shisha markets, and if you are sourcing shisha-grade coconut briquettes the ranking you have just read is largely not about your product.

The reason is in the customs heading rather than in the data. HS 4402 covers wood charcoal generally — lump, hardwood, shell and briquettes together — so a destination ranking built on that heading aggregates barbecue lump bound for Europe with shisha briquettes bound for the Gulf and reports one number. The list is not wrong. It is answering a broader question than the one most readers arrive with, and no source in this page's bibliography flags the distinction. We have set out how to read a disagreement between trade sources at greater length on the origin comparison, and the same discipline applies here.

One market-wide figure is worth carrying for the same reason, with the same caution. Across all charcoal, the average export price fell to USD 526 per tonne in 2024, down 14.8% from a USD 617 peak in 2023 (The Charcoal Factory, updated 26 August 2026). That is an average over every grade and form the heading contains, in every trade lane. It is a fact about the customs line, not a quotation, and it should not be read as one.

Where the heading's tonnage goes, and where we ship

Set against all of that, our own book is a short and much less impressive list, and it is the only line on this page that is ours. Coco Reina exports to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, India and Australia — twelve destinations.

Note what is deliberately absent. There is no tonnage here, no share of any market, and no ranking of those twelve against each other. A destination list tells a buyer which customs regimes, document sets and transit realities a supplier has actually dealt with; it does not tell them how big that supplier is, and suppliers who publish it as though it did are answering a question nobody asked. The overlap with the statistical list is partial and informative on its own: Germany appears in both, the Gulf and Levant markets that dominate our book barely register in the 2018 ministry five, and that gap is the 4402 problem restated in first-person.

What the ranking means for buyers

Two practical uses, and one misuse worth naming. The first use is competition for supply: if you are buying into a market that sits high on the heading-wide list, you are bidding alongside barbecue and industrial buyers for kiln time and container space, not only against other shisha importers. The second is seasonality by proxy — a destination mix weighted toward Europe and Northeast Asia behaves differently across a year than one weighted toward the Gulf, and a supplier's book tells you which pattern their production is tuned to.

The misuse is treating any of this as a quality signal. A country appearing near the top of a customs heading says something about volume and nothing whatever about grade, ash, or whether a given factory's material would pass your own laboratory. For that you want the certificate of analysis for the batch in front of you. And if the question underneath the ranking is really "why Indonesia at all", the answer is about shell supply rather than about export tables — which is a different page.