The invention discloses a process for producing bead ferronickel by a rotary hearth furnace through coal-based reduction of red soil nickel oxide ores, which is capable of reducing the production cost and belongs to the technical field of production of iron alloys. The process comprises the following steps of: a, after finely crushing, dosing, mixing and pelletizing raw red soil nickel oxide ores, reducing coal and a flux, drying to obtain dry balls; b, reducing the dry balls into the rotary hearth furnace, and carrying out water quenching, cooling, crushing and magnetic separation on the discharged high-temperature clinker so as to obtain a bead ferronickel alloy and slag. According to the invention, the rotary hearth furnace is taken as a reducing device, non-coking coal with cheap price and wide resource distribution is directly taken as a reducing agent, and coal gas is taken as main energy, so that the production cost is low, the process is applied to a construction plant of a mine region with power resource scarcity, the restriction condition of higher transportation cost of raw materials of the conventional factory is overcome, the process is simple and easy to operate and put into large-scale production application, and the obtained bead ferronickel has high nickel grade and high metal recovery rate, and is a high-quality raw material for producing stainless steel.