Macron Shuts Door on Chinese Investors in New Caledonia Nickel Industry

France’s president has told New Caledonian politicians he does not want Chinese money in the territory’s stricken nickel industry—and is instead directing Emirati and Indian bidders towards its three loss-making smelters.

This is according to an account posted by Nicolas Metzdorf, a French politician who serves as a member of the French National Assembly for New Caledonia’s 1st constituency.

He wrote on LinkedIn that he and a cross-party delegation met President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace on Sept. 5, 2026, and that “most of the discussions were on the strategic subject of nickel.”

He said the president “clearly closed the door to investors from the Middle Kingdom [China]” while favouring Emirati and Indian groups as “France’s leading allies,” citing defence ties.

A New Caledonian media outlet reporting from the same meeting quoted Metzdorf saying that “The president of the Republic does not want a Chinese investor in New Caledonia,” and named Indian, Emirati and Chinese groups as being among those “positioning themselves” to take over the territory’s plants.

Nickel is central to New Caledonia’s economy. The sector accounts for 85 to 90 percent of the territory’s mechandise exports and 13,000 direct and indirect jobs.

3 Smelters Struggling Against Chinese-Backed Exports

The territory has three smelters: Doniambo in Nouméa (owned by Société Le Nickel, a French company with minority New Caledonia holdings), Koniambo in the north (majority-owned by local firm SMSP, with Glencore holding 49 percent), and Prony Resources in the south (a consortium consisting of 51 percent local New Caledonian interests, with 19 percent held by the Swiss commodities trader Trafigura, and 30 percent by Agio Globalin).

All three have required state and shareholder rescue funding in recent years amid a global price collapse driven by a surge in low-cost Indonesian supply from smelters mostly owned by China—an issue which caused BHP to shut down its Australian nickel operations in 2024.

New Caledonia holds an estimated 7.1 million tonnes of nickel reserves, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (pdf), but its mine output fell 52 percent in 2024, to 110,000 tonnes, which the USGS attributes to civil unrest and weak global prices.

In contrast, Indonesia alone produced 2.2 million tonnes in 2024 from reserves of 55 million tonnes—a scale of production that has driven down world prices and put pressure on New Caledonia’s higher-cost operations.

The European Union classifies battery-grade nickel as a “strategic raw material” under its 2024 Critical Raw Materials Act, alongside lithium and cobalt, reflecting the metal’s role in electric vehicle batteries and the bloc’s push to reduce reliance on any single external supplier.

It’s also one of the critical minerals subject to the Memorandum of Understanding between the EU and the United States.

Agreements Failed

Two attempts to reach agreement between Paris and Nouméa on nickel mining failed because they were effectively footnotes to a larger plan to create a “State of New Caledonia” inside the French Republic—as distinct from the independence referendums New Caledonia already held and rejected in 2018, 2020 and 2021.

The constitutional bill required to enact them passed the Senate on Feb. 24, 2026, but the National Assembly killed it outright on Apr. 2, adopting a “motion de rejet préalable” that blocked it at first reading.

The referendum in which Caledonians would have ratified the new status—due by April 26, 2026, then pushed back “at the latest” to July 26, never took place.

By Sept. 2, 2026, the Union Progressiste en Mélanésie, one of the accords’ signatories, declared the agreement “no more,” saying talks were unlikely to resume before France’s 2027 presidential election.

A separate “pacte nickel,” floated in 2024 to lock in state and shareholder financing for the three smelters, remains unresolved; a January 2024 joint communiqué recorded only that industrial shareholders had been asked to “consider the conditions under which they could provide support.”

The clearest sign of outside interest is at Koniambo.

After Glencore said in 2024 it wanted to exit, two undisclosed bidders submitted offers for its 49 percent stake by early January 2025, its president said.

By October 2025 two named parties were circling the plant—Lygend Resources and Technology, a Chinese nickel processor with projects in Indonesia, and JSL/Jindal Stainless Limited, an Indian steelmaker.

Metzdorf’s post ended by speculating that America could yet “get involved” in the nickel question, but The Epoch Times could not independently corroborate this against any U.S. government statement.

There are, however, private deals between New Caledonia miners and U.S. end users, such as one between Prony and Tesla, and analysts and policy groups have urged the U.S. government (pdf) to establish a specific critical minerals agreement with France to integrate New Caledonian supply chains more smoothly.