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Refined Nickel Price — 10-Day Trend
All prices in ₹ per gram · daily rate, updated once per day
What Nickel Pig Iron Actually Is
Before getting into nickel pig iron, here is where the refined benchmark sits today: ₹1.41 per gram, September 17, 2026. Nickel pig iron — almost always shortened to NPI in industry conversation — is a different product from that benchmark, even though both ultimately trace back to nickel ore. NPI is a lower-purity, lower-cost form of nickel, produced mainly in Indonesia and China, built specifically to feed stainless steel production rather than to compete with high-purity refined nickel across every use case.
The reason NPI exists is straightforward economics. Producing nickel to the purity traded on the London Metal Exchange is expensive. Stainless steel, which is nickel's largest single use by a wide margin, doesn't require that level of purity to do its job — it needs nickel content for corrosion resistance, not laboratory-grade metal. NPI production routes were developed to turn lower-grade nickel ore into a usable input at a materially lower cost than refining it to LME standard.
Refined Nickel Price by Weight
Today's Nickel rate is One Rupees per gram. At this rate, 10 grams of Nickel costs Fourteen Rupees.
| Unit | Weight | Price (INR) | Price in Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Gram | 1.0000 g | ₹1.41 | One Rupees |
| 8 Grams | 8.0000 g | ₹11.28 | Eleven Rupees |
| 10 Grams | 10.0000 g | ₹14.10 | Fourteen Rupees |
| 100 Grams | 100.0000 g | ₹140.97 | One Hundred and Forty One Rupees |
| 1 Kilogram | 1,000.0000 g | ₹1,409.67 | One Thousand Four Hundred and Ten Rupees |
| 1 Ounce (oz) | 28.3495 g | ₹39.96 | Forty Rupees |
| 1 Troy Ounce | 31.1035 g | ₹43.85 | Forty Four Rupees |
| 1 Metric Ton | 1,000,000.0000 g | ₹1,409,666.00 | Fourteen Lakh Nine Thousand Six Hundred and Sixty Six Rupees |
Why Indonesia Is the Center of the NPI Story
NPI production sits at the heart of why Indonesia has become by far the largest nickel-producing country. Indonesia's nickel ore reserves, combined with heavy investment in domestic smelting capacity built specifically around NPI and related processing routes, turned the country from a raw ore exporter into the dominant force in finished nickel supply. China remains the other major NPI producer, historically the larger buyer of Indonesian ore before Indonesia built out its own domestic processing.
Not a universal substitute
It's worth being precise about NPI's limits. It works well as a stainless steel input, where purity requirements are more forgiving. It is not generally suited to EV battery cathode production, where nickel-rich chemistries like NMC and NCA need higher-purity material than NPI typically provides. So while NPI has reshaped the stainless steel side of the nickel market, it has not displaced refined nickel's role in the newer battery-demand story.
That distinction matters for anyone trying to understand nickel pricing as a whole. A cheap, abundant supply of NPI can hold down costs for stainless steel makers even while refined nickel, the grade this page's benchmark tracks, responds to a completely different set of pressures from the battery side of demand.
Refined Nickel Price — Last 10 Days
The most recent Nickel price on record (2026-09-17) is One Rupees per gram.
| Date | Price (INR/g) | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-17 | ₹1.41 | +0.00 |
| 2026-09-16 | ₹1.41 | +0.01 |
| 2026-09-15 | ₹1.39 | -0.03 |
| 2026-09-14 | ₹1.43 | -0.01 |
| 2026-09-13 | ₹1.44 | +0.00 |
| 2026-09-12 | ₹1.43 | +0.00 |
| 2026-09-11 | ₹1.43 | -0.02 |
| 2026-09-10 | ₹1.45 | -0.01 |
| 2026-09-09 | ₹1.46 | +0.01 |
| 2026-09-08 | ₹1.45 | — |
How NPI Fits Into the Bigger Nickel Market
NPI's scale matters beyond stainless steel economics alone. Because so much of it is produced, its availability effectively puts a ceiling on how far stainless steel demand alone can push the price of refined nickel. If stainless steel producers can meet their nickel needs through NPI at a lower cost, that demand doesn't compete as hard for LME-grade metal, which affects the pricing dynamics tracked on the rest of this site.
It also explains part of why nickel's price story has become more complicated over the past decade. There isn't one nickel market anymore in any simple sense — there's a stainless-steel-facing market substantially served by NPI, and a higher-purity market serving electronics, specialty alloys and increasingly EV batteries. Both feed into the headline LME nickel benchmark, but the pressures pushing on each side aren't identical, and that's a large part of why nickel can behave in ways that surprise people expecting it to track a single, simple demand story.
Nickel Pig Iron — FAQs
Nickel pig iron, usually shortened to NPI, is a lower-purity, lower-cost form of nickel produced mainly in Indonesia and China. It was developed specifically as a cheaper way to get nickel units into stainless steel production, rather than as a general-purpose substitute for refined nickel everywhere the metal is used.
Refined nickel, of the purity traded on the London Metal Exchange, is more expensive to produce. NPI production routes were developed to process lower-grade nickel ore more cheaply, giving stainless steel makers — where the alloy doesn't need LME-grade purity — a materially lower-cost input for the same basic job.
Not in the same way. Battery-grade nickel for EV cathode chemistries (NMC and NCA) generally needs higher purity than NPI provides, so the battery supply chain relies on more processed forms of nickel rather than NPI directly, even though some processing pathways do start from nickel ore similar to what feeds NPI production.
Generally yes — NPI trades at a discount to LME-grade refined nickel, reflecting its lower purity and different end use. This page's benchmark of ₹1.41 per gram tracks the refined nickel reference, not NPI specifically.
Because it is produced in such large volumes, mainly in Indonesia, NPI supply availability affects how much pricing power refined nickel has for stainless steel demand specifically. When NPI is abundant and cheap, it can cap how far stainless steel demand alone pushes the refined nickel price upward.
