Indonesia launches an anti-dumping investigation into Chinese superabsorbent polymers, the workhorse chemical inside diapers and sanitary products, after a petition from PT Nippon Shokubai Indonesia
JAKARTA, August 18, 2026
Indonesia has opened a new front in its expanding campaign against allegedly underpriced Chinese industrial goods, this time targeting the obscure but commercially vital chemical that makes disposable diapers work. The Indonesian Anti-Dumping Committee, known by its Indonesian acronym KADI, announced on Friday, August 14, that it has initiated a formal anti-dumping investigation into imports of superabsorbent polymers, or SAP, originating from China.
The probe, first reported by Indonesian state news agency ANTARA and the legal intelligence service MLex, follows a petition filed by PT Nippon Shokubai Indonesia, the Cilegon-based subsidiary of Japan’s Nippon Shokubai Co., which acts as the petitioner on behalf of the domestic industry. The investigation covers imports entering Indonesia between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2025, a four-year window during which, according to KADI’s initiation notice, Indonesia imported 570,543 metric tons of SAP. Of that total, 354,918 tons, or roughly 62 percent, came from China.
“Based on the review of the sufficiency and accuracy of the initial evidence, KADI found an increase in imports of SAP products from China. This has caused injury to the domestic industry,” KADI Chairwoman Frida Adiati said in a statement issued in Jakarta on August 14, as reported by Liputan6 and DDTC News and translated from the original Indonesian.
The investigation is expected to run for 12 months and can be extended to 18 months if needed, in line with Government Regulation No. 34 of 2011, the framework statute governing Indonesia’s anti-dumping, countervailing, and safeguard actions. If KADI finds that Chinese SAP was sold into Indonesia at less than normal value and that those sales injured domestic producers, the committee will recommend anti-dumping duties to the trade minister, who forwards the proposal to the finance ministry for implementation.
For global chemical traders, hygiene-product manufacturers, and the procurement teams that sit between them, the case is worth watching closely. Indonesia is one of the largest diaper and sanitary-product markets in Southeast Asia, and any duty on Chinese SAP would reshuffle sourcing patterns across a supply chain that stretches from acrylic acid crackers in Jiangsu to diaper converting lines in Karawang.
What KADI Announced
According to the initiation details published by DDTC News, a Jakarta-based tax and trade publication, the products under investigation are superabsorbent polymers classified under Harmonized System subheadings 3906.90.92 and 3906.90.99 of Indonesia’s 2022 customs tariff book, known as the BTKI 2022. Those codes sit within the broader HS heading for acrylic polymers in primary forms.
Frida said KADI initiated the case after reviewing the adequacy and accuracy of the preliminary evidence submitted in the petition, the standard threshold test under Indonesian trade-remedy law. The committee concluded that the evidence of increased imports from China and resulting injury to the domestic industry was sufficient to proceed.
KADI has notified all parties it considers interested in the outcome. Per DDTC News, those notifications went to the domestic industry, registered importers, and the known Chinese exporters and producers of SAP. The committee also informed the Chinese government’s representation in Indonesia and the Indonesian Embassy in Beijing, satisfying the transparency obligations that attach to World Trade Organization members when they open anti-dumping proceedings.
The committee has invited interested parties to submit information and responses during the investigation, and to request hearings if they wish to present arguments orally. In practice, Chinese exporters that want individual dumping margins, rather than a punitive residual rate, will need to register, complete KADI’s questionnaires, and cooperate with verification. Importers and downstream users in Indonesia, including the country’s sizable diaper-manufacturing sector, will have the same window to argue that duties would harm the broader economy.
The case has also been logged internationally: the Global Trade Alert database, which tracks state interventions affecting commerce worldwide, recorded the initiation as intervention number 158696, adding it to a rapidly lengthening list of trade-defense actions aimed at Chinese chemical products.
The Petitioner: A Japanese Multinational Wearing an Indonesian Hat
The complainant profile in this case carries a familiar irony of modern trade politics: the “domestic industry” seeking protection from Chinese imports is the local arm of a Japanese chemical multinational.
PT Nippon Shokubai Indonesia, established in August 1996, operates its head office and manufacturing complex in Cilegon, on the industrialized western tip of Java in Banten province. The company produces acrylic acid, acrylates, and superabsorbent polymers, an integrated chain in which acrylic acid is the essential feedstock for SAP. According to parent company announcements, the Indonesian subsidiary inaugurated a new 100,000 ton per year acrylic acid facility in May 2023, an investment of roughly 200 million dollars that lifted its total acrylic acid capacity to 240,000 tons per year.
The company is also in the middle of a major SAP expansion. Nippon Shokubai announced in 2024 that its Indonesian subsidiary would add 50,000 tons per year of SAP capacity to its existing 90,000 tons, bringing the Cilegon site to 140,000 tons per year. A groundbreaking ceremony for the new SAP plant was held in August 2025, with mechanical completion targeted for January 2027 and commercial operation planned for July 2027, according to the company’s public statements. Industry press has reported that the project will push Nippon Shokubai’s global SAP capacity to about 760,000 tons per year by 2027, reinforcing its position among the world’s largest producers of the material.
That timeline is not incidental to the trade case. The petition lands as the company prepares to bring significant new domestic capacity online into a market where, on KADI’s own figures, imports have been running at well over 100,000 tons per year on average, with China supplying nearly two thirds. A finding of dumping and injury, followed by duties, would materially improve the commercial runway for the expanded Cilegon plant. Trade lawyers often note that anti-dumping petitions cluster around capacity expansions for exactly this reason: new investment sharpens a producer’s sensitivity to import pricing, and it gives the petitioner a concrete story to tell about threatened returns.
Nippon Shokubai Indonesia had not published a detailed public statement on the petition beyond KADI’s initiation materials as of Monday, and the company’s specific injury allegations, including claims about price undercutting, lost sales, or suppressed margins, will only become fully visible in the non-confidential version of the petition file.
The Product: The Invisible Workhorse of the Hygiene Aisle
Superabsorbent polymers rarely make headlines, but they are among the most consequential specialty chemicals in daily life. SAP is a cross-linked polyacrylate, typically produced from acrylic acid and sodium hydroxide, supplied as a white granular powder. Its defining property is an extraordinary capacity to absorb and retain liquid: as Liputan6 noted in its report on the KADI case, the material can soak up water at as much as one hundred times its own weight, binding water molecules within its polymer structure to form a gel that locks the liquid in place.
That property makes SAP the functional core of disposable baby diapers, which account for the large majority of global demand, along with feminine hygiene products, adult incontinence products, and a range of other absorbent applications, from medical pads to water-blocking tape in fiber-optic cables and moisture-retention agents in agriculture.
Demand fundamentals in Indonesia are robust. The country of roughly 280 million people has a large birth cohort, rising female workforce participation, and, increasingly, an aging population driving adult incontinence sales, all of which support long-run growth in absorbent hygiene products. Global consumer names and regional players operate diaper converting plants in Indonesia, and those factories buy SAP by the ton, either from the Cilegon plant or from importers.
The economics of the material help explain why import pricing is so contentious. SAP is a commodity-like specialty: quality and absorbency specifications matter, and qualification cycles with diaper makers can take months, but once a supplier is qualified, purchasing decisions are heavily price-driven. SAP also travels well, shipping efficiently in bulk bags, which means low-priced export offers from large producers can move markets thousands of kilometers away. When Chinese producers expanded aggressively over the past half decade, Southeast Asia was the natural first destination.
China’s Chemical Export Wave
The Indonesian SAP case does not exist in a vacuum. It is one data point in a much larger story: the surge of Chinese chemical and polymer exports that followed the country’s massive petrochemical capacity build-out and the softening of its domestic demand.
Chinese producers invested heavily in acrylic acid and SAP capacity through the early 2020s, part of a broader push into downstream chemicals that also swelled capacity in polypropylene, polyethylene, polyurethanes, and dozens of other product lines. When domestic consumption failed to keep pace, exports absorbed the surplus. Industry analytics firm ICIS has documented the pattern vividly in adjacent markets: Chinese polypropylene exports, around 400,000 tons as recently as 2020, were on track to reach roughly 3.2 million tons in 2025. Trade press reporting on customs data showed China’s commodity polymer exports up 29 percent year on year in the first seven months of 2025, to more than 11 million tons, propelled by record-low domestic prices.
The backlash has been global. In Europe, chemical maker Ineos publicly urged the European Commission to intervene against what it called unfair chemical imports and said it had filed ten anti-dumping cases; the Commission adopted 162 anti-dumping measures in 2024, 62 of them against Chinese companies, according to Chemistry World’s reporting. In the United States, an anti-dumping case on Chinese methylene diphenyl diisocyanate, a polyurethane precursor, produced preliminary margins as high as 511.75 percent and a final rate of 161.6 percent, effectively closing the American market to Chinese material, as trade publication PUdaily reported. India, Brazil, and Turkey have all run their own dockets against Chinese polymers and intermediates.
Beijing has acknowledged the overcapacity problem rhetorically, promoting an “anti-involution” campaign intended to curb ruinous price competition and discipline capacity additions. But analysts tracking the sector report that operational reality has lagged the policy signals, with surplus capacity across the chemical industry still measured in the hundreds of millions of tons and export volumes continuing to climb. For import-dependent manufacturing economies such as Indonesia, that means cheap inputs for downstream factories, but sustained pressure on any domestic producer competing with the imported material.
Indonesia’s Widening Trade-Remedy Front
For Jakarta, the SAP investigation extends a pattern that has become one of the defining features of its trade policy in the mid-2020s: a steady accumulation of anti-dumping and safeguard actions aimed largely, though not exclusively, at Chinese goods.
The steel sector has seen the most sustained activity. Indonesia imposed an anti-dumping duty of 20 percent on certain Chinese hot rolled coil and alloy steel products at the start of 2025, a measure aimed at protecting domestic mills, and KADI subsequently opened a further probe into Chinese hot-rolled coil at the request of Krakatau Posco, the joint venture between state steelmaker Krakatau Steel and South Korea’s POSCO, as reported by Jakarta Globe. Ceramics, textiles, garments, and footwear have likewise been the subject of safeguard duties and enforcement pushes, as officials responded to complaints from domestic manufacturers that a flood of low-priced imports was forcing factory closures and layoffs, particularly in the labor-intensive textile belt of West Java.
The macro backdrop sharpens the politics. Analysis published by The Diplomat in February 2026 argued that sixteen years after the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area took full effect, the bilateral trade balance has tilted persistently in China’s favor, with Indonesian manufacturers absorbing intensifying import competition across consumer and intermediate goods. Indonesian officials have repeatedly signaled that trade-remedy instruments, which are legal under WTO rules when their evidentiary tests are met, are the preferred tool for managing that pressure without resorting to blunt import bans that could invite retaliation or violate commitments.
There is also a global-diversion dimension. With the United States maintaining steep tariffs on a wide range of Chinese goods and the European Union tightening its own trade defenses, exporters in China have redirected volumes toward Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Southeast Asian governments worry openly about becoming the residual market for deflected Chinese supply. Every new duty wall erected in Washington or Brussels increases the volume looking for a home elsewhere, and Indonesia’s trade-remedy docket has grown accordingly.
The SAP case fits the template: a capital-intensive domestic industry, a dominant Chinese import share, a documented surge in volumes, and a petitioner with the resources and legal sophistication to assemble a case file that survives KADI’s sufficiency review.
Stakes for the Domestic Market
The immediate commercial question is what an eventual duty would do to Indonesia’s hygiene-products value chain.
On the producer side, the calculus is straightforward. Nippon Shokubai Indonesia’s current 90,000 tons of SAP capacity, rising to 140,000 tons next year, is more than enough to supply a large share of domestic demand if it can win the volumes at sustainable prices. KADI’s import figures imply average SAP imports of about 143,000 tons per year across the 2022 to 2025 period, with Chinese material averaging close to 89,000 tons per year. A duty that priced some portion of that Chinese volume out of the market would hand the Cilegon plant a substantially larger addressable base just as its expansion comes online.
On the consumer side, the arithmetic is less comfortable. SAP typically represents a meaningful slice of the raw-material cost of a diaper, and diaper makers operate on thin margins in a fiercely competitive retail environment where price points are sticky. If duties raise landed SAP costs, converters will face a choice among absorbing the hit, negotiating harder with the domestic producer, qualifying alternative import sources such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, or Singapore, or passing costs through to consumers of diapers and sanitary products, goods with obvious social sensitivity in a middle-income country. Downstream users frequently intervene in Indonesian trade-remedy proceedings to make exactly these arguments, and KADI’s injury analysis will have to weigh them.
There is also an investment-climate subtext that cuts in the petitioner’s favor. Indonesia has spent years courting exactly the kind of investment Nippon Shokubai has made in Cilegon: export-capable, technology-intensive chemical manufacturing that deepens the domestic value chain beyond commodities. If a flagship Japanese investor concludes that its new capacity cannot earn a return because of dumped imports, the signal to other prospective investors would be chilling. Officials weighing the final measure will not ignore that dimension.
Implications for Global Importers, Exporters, and Supply Chains
For Chinese SAP producers, Indonesia’s move threatens one of their most important regional outlets at a moment when trade-defense walls are rising in multiple jurisdictions at once. Exporters that fail to cooperate with KADI’s questionnaires risk facts-available margins at the top of the range; those that do cooperate face months of costly proceedings with no guarantee of a workable rate. Some will respond the way Chinese exporters have in other product lines: by rerouting sales to markets without measures, discounting more aggressively elsewhere, or exploring transshipment and third-country processing options that trade authorities increasingly scrutinize.
For multinational SAP producers outside China, including BASF, LG Chem, Sumitomo Seika, Formosa, and Nippon Shokubai’s own network of plants in Japan, Belgium, the United States, and China, an Indonesian duty on Chinese material could open incremental selling opportunities in a growing market. Regional traders will be watching the case calendar closely, since provisional measures, if KADI recommends them, can arrive well before the final determination and can reprice spot cargoes overnight.
For global hygiene brands with Indonesian operations, the prudent play is already familiar from the steel and textile cases: register as interested parties, file questionnaire responses documenting the cost impact, dual-qualify non-Chinese SAP grades as insurance, and model duty scenarios into 2027 budgets. Procurement teams that waited out earlier Indonesian cases learned that final duties can apply for five years and be extended through sunset reviews, long enough to justify structural sourcing changes rather than temporary workarounds.
The case will also be read in Beijing as another data point in a deteriorating pattern. China has generally responded to Southeast Asian trade-remedy actions with restraint compared with its reactions to Western measures, valuing the broader economic relationship. But the accumulation of Indonesian actions, layered on measures elsewhere, feeds the pressure on Chinese chemical producers to rationalize capacity at home, which is precisely the outcome the anti-involution campaign has so far failed to deliver.
What Happens Next
The procedural path from here is well marked. Interested parties will register and receive questionnaires; KADI will analyze dumping margins by comparing Chinese export prices to normal values, assess injury indicators such as the domestic industry’s market share, prices, profits, and capacity utilization, and test the causal link between the imports and the injury. Hearings can be requested along the way. Within 12 months, or 18 with an extension, the committee will issue its final report and, if the findings support it, recommend definitive duties to the government.
Nothing about initiation predetermines the outcome; KADI cases have ended without measures when the evidence fell short. But the structural facts published so far, a 62 percent Chinese import share, a surging global supply overhang, and a domestic producer mid-expansion, make this a case that traders should assume has a serious chance of ending in duties. By late 2027, the price of keeping Indonesian babies dry may depend a good deal less on the marginal ton of polymer leaving a Chinese port, and a good deal more on what happens in a hearing room in Jakarta.