The Indonesian archipelago is well known to us for its
thousands of scenic islands, majestic waters and paddy fields. The country is
the 27th export nation in the world with rich natural resources such
as timber, oil, coal, rubber and bauxite. This heterogeneous nation believed to
have over 300 ethnic groups and 700 spoken dialects, have been pushing and prodding
since the 1998 financial crisis for change, economic development and higher
standards of living. This probably explains why many of the elected government leaders
short lived their stay after disposition of Suharto in 1998.
The real economic shift probably started in year 2004 with consumer
spending growing over 50% since then. Today only 11.7% of the population live
under poverty line (1 to 2 USD per day), whereas the middleclass and urban
elites are growing, although much of the middleclass is still clustering near
the poverty lines. Growth is not consistent throughout the country but at least
there is a ripple effect of wealth distribution to all levels in some form or
the other, that more and more Indonesians are now able to spend on goods other
than basic necessities such as apparels, clothing and gadgets.
There were several reasons for this rapid economic growth in
the last 10 years alone. One of them is the emergence of cheaper and effective
means of communication and information dissemination, namely the Internet and mobile
devices which is an indicator tracked by analyst firms such as Mckinsey and
World Bank.
Internet and Mobile Phone - A Basic Household Necessity
Indonesia has some 74 million Internet users hitherto and is
expected to touch around 83.6 million by end of 2014, according to reports by research
company statista. 30% of Internet users
get access using fixed line and the rest via mobile data services using mobile
phones or handheld devices. The speed
for fixed line ranges from 2.2 to 4 Mbps whereas mobile data services are
ranging from 10 to 20 Mbps as 4G adoption takes stage to facilitate a data
hungry nation. How significant are Indonesian Internet users to the South East
Asia online market and other key markets such as China and India? Indonesia has
more Internet users than any single country in South East Asia or even highly
penetrated countries such as Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore put together. The
current Internet penetration rate has barely touched 30% of the total population.
Growth trends are highly promising as users see their access
to Internet as a mean to improve their standards of living and a necessity
rather than just a status device to boost self esteem. Internet and gadgets are
both gateway and tool, a much needed investment in every household to stay in
touch with family and friends; keep up with news and trends; access financial
services; trade opportunities; education services; health services; find jobs
or business opportunities, and etc.
Mobile penetration is at 120% at the moment. The lower Smartphone
prices and cheaper data packages offered by operators in the recent years is
driving adoption with Smartphones including Blackberry representing perhaps 15
to 18% of devices. The cost of Smartphone is under USD 200 and as low as USD 51,
makes it affordable for many classes. This results in consumers skipping the fixed line
services altogether and jumping directly to mobile data services just like how
fix line phone was dropped for mobile phones in the late 80s and 90s.
Social Media for Change and Progress
Indonesians are one of the most active social media users in
the world. Their popular social media platforms are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. What are they doing with it? They are
expressing themselves to keep the check and balance on current issues that
affects them. They share images, videos, text and information related to
politics, government, entertainment, economy, products, services and simply
life in Indonesia. They are most likely to post a feedback online on services,
products or experience good and bad. They voice views; approval and disapproval
of motions; garner support for a worthy cause; and drive change economic,
social and political from their very seats as citizens.
That is a lot of crowd power and there is no mistake why the
Indonesian politicians, celebrities and even businesses pay a special attention
to social media in Indonesia. For example the current President Joko Widodo or ‘Jokowi’ won the election due to his
social media savvy campaign reaching voters from every corner of vast Indonesia
governed through 300 district governments.
The Indonesian archipelago is connected via social media to propagate
change and development. Like any other medium of communication social media too
has its cons, as a small minority of outlaws and left wings use it to spur
animosity, hate and resentment which can halt development and progress, but the
Indonesians are rebutting this too via social media as the case of the recent
effort of Indonesian authorities to draw out ISIL pitchman ‘Bahrumsyah’. Widespread
news on ISIL alerted people living faraway from city areas on the ill intended
group where villagers have stopped such groups from gathering in their mosques or
recruiting unsuspecting youngsters for unlawful causes.
Government’s Response to ‘Indonesia Online’
The Open Government Indonesia (OGI) was officially
established in 2012 but the notion of an open, citizen focused government with
high accountability for its actions exist since 1998, when political and
economic reform agenda was high at a point when the nation was hit hard by financial
crisis. The overall poor mobilization of critical resources, economic
opportunities, and national peace along with widespread corruption impacted
millions of people and lead to the frustration of the Indonesian people
degrading confidence in the government vehicles then.
The Indonesian government probably started its journey onto
the online medium since the victory of Jokowi
as Jakarta’s governor in 2012. He campaigned creatively to communicate with
followers via a combination of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and others
which resulted in Indonesians voting for a candidate based on merits as a
public servant rather than pedigree and connections, clearly setting a new tone
to the future of the country. In the same year Indonesia was ranked as the number
one twitter nation with some 15 tweets a minute.
OGI is the government’s response to the Indonesian people’s
call for transparency, improvement and development. This is a humungous effort,
still flawed in many ways, due to the execution intricacies involved in paving
through a developing country with less mature government structures, legal
settings and policies to support it. Nevertheless, where there is a will, there
is a way. The Indonesian government has started their conscientious journey and
is now figuring the online medium towards building a culture of excellence in
government reach. More public information is made available for public poking,
more data is made available for crowd analysis (including election documents)
and innovation is spurring through a variety of channel government and
non-government. The pace of the adoption is still sluggish, but this is new for
Indonesia and much of South East Asia, where access to even the most public of
government information is hard to come by. Indonesia is on the lead and is
embracing this new sentiment preparing for a future with active public
intervention in government operation.
Business Response to ‘Indonesia Online’
The growth of the internet industry in Indonesia like many
other South East Asian and emerging countries was kind of an ancillary development
while trying to capitalize on the population’s collective behavior to stay
connected with recent news, information, income opportunities and current events
of the country while steering towards a better life.
Underdeveloped or developing nations such as Indonesia picks
on this trend as fast, if not faster than the developed nations for very
different reasons. The later adopts Internet for sophistication and convenience;
the former adopts the Internet as a platform to stay connected and propagate
sentiments personal, social, economic and politics cost effectively. OTT (Over the
Top) solutions such as Skype, Facebook, Google
search, instant messaging, and emails build on cloud computing architecture cost
nothing to users apart from the access and data subscription fee as OTT players
generate income from businesses merely through advertising and traffic routing.
The Internet is an alternative to voice and SMS services for many Indonesians since
the early millennium.
Realigning and Reinventing Revenue Generating Services
The Indonesian Telecom and mobile operators apprehended the
repercussions of this trend to their business at a very early stage, as they
observed dwindling profitability in the steam of SMS and voice revenue loss,
intensified with increased infrastructure/network upgrade and expansion cost.
Today, the top three telecommunication service operators in
Indonesia; Telkomsel, XL Axiata and Indosat generate at least 20% of their
revenue from mobile data services. There are around 320 million mobile
subscribers and 130 million mobile enabled data subscribers with the three
monopolizing almost 87% of mobile data subscriber market share in Indonesia. This
doesn’t mean voice and SMS services has phased out completely, but merely a new
revenue opportunity, in this case data services has been identified and
embraced as a significant contributor to the revenue portfolio. In addition,
new use cases are invented for stopping revenue leaks from traditional services
such as SMS and voice. For instance, the use of SMS in security validation in
financial transaction, marketing and promotion of product offers.
Optimizing Operation and Customer Reach
Traditional industries such as financial services, health,
education, real estate, retail, transportation, publications media and others,
all recognizes Internet as a new channel to broaden their reach to target
audience and an opportunity to further optimize operation by cutting back on
brick and mortar outlets and traditional content distribution cost while
improving campaigns and customer experience with their brands. Many still are going
through transformation and ciphering the Internet as an effective customer
engagement channel but some services are already apparent. For example online
banking and payment services (BNI, BII, CIMB and etc) , education (Sibejoo), health (tanyadok) , classifieds, C2C
marketplaces and real estate.
New Business Opportunities
While the traditional industries transform, there were many ground
up internet businesses appeared to quickly capture opportunities to provide
bridging services to overcome shortcomings and limitations of conventionally
run businesses or simply deliver new value to consumers. Mobile money, e-wallets
such as ‘Indosat’s
Dompetku’ became
a financial solution for a largely unbanked population; ticketing portal such
as ‘tiket.com’ helped sale of seats for entertainment
events; travel portals provided price comparisons for hotels and air ticket,
gaming and the list continues. The retail scene too has permutated with online
stores for apparels, clothing, electronics and groceries rises displacing traditional brick and mortar
outlets driving traditional retailers such as PT Mitra Adiperkasa, to
embark on organization wide business transformation while adding online
channels into their marketing mix for their branded stores such as Planetsports, Zara and Marcs and Spencer.
The B2C retail market is assessed
to be around 1.9 billion USD in 2014 and translates to just 0.7% of the total
retail market (134 Billion USD). The market is expected to grow at 40 to 50% in
average while the Internet Users grow at 20% rate. At 5% conversion this market
is 6.7 billion USD and 10% conversion 13.7 billion USD that is larger than
Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia put together. So there is still room for many more players
to appear despite some early penetration from brands such as Lazada, Zalora,
Luxola, Rakuten, Alibaba and etc. There is still time for a prominent player to
surface and a fair shake is possible to take
the market reigns with critical value, is wide open for players domestic and
foreign.
Looking forward to a full blown Internet Industry – The New Order
It is a long painstaking road, but some journey has been
covered and hard lessons have been learned by private and public sectors alike.
This is a nation with a 122% mobile penetration (Smartphone penetration at 23%)
and with less than 25% of people with bank account. The trend is clear that
Internet plays a much critical role in an individual’s life socially and
economically. It is also no surprise that access to Internet has a close tie to
economic opportunities available to an individual. Therefore infrastructure
investment is crucial to improve Internet service levels and data services in
par with ASEAN standards of 15Mbps and beyond. This will fuel economic
activities, incubate new income opportunities and create new jobs to replace
those lost in other industries phasing out with time such as agriculture and
some manufacturing lines.
Linchpin service providers such as the financial services institutions
have a critical role to play in rethinking services suitable for a nation of
growing middleclass through collaboration or deployment of micro business
models. This will bring efficiencies to online transactions by eliminating cost
and risk associated with disconnected processes or cash collection and
distributions. Domestic logistics networks owned by national post and other
delivery/courier service businesses can very cleverly use this new industry to
their advantage and ace deliveries to domestic routes while establishing
co-alliance with global logistics firms for end to end service. And there is at
least 2 jobs created for every job lost when the Internet industry is
concerned. It is a matter of adaptation and seeing through the transformation
so that no one is left behind.
The most significant new order in
this changeover however, is the fact that there is a new critical stakeholder in
shaping brands of any kind and they can exercise their power in the click of a
button. Indonesian consumers are an integral constituent in any marketing or
campaign mix today and their power is undeniable. The challenge is, how to use
this wildcard effectively to build a positive image that reaps value for all market
participants. Hence a new journey and passage begins.
