BUMN Streamlining: A Rational Move to Save State Assets?

JAKARTA – Akbar Faizal, Executive Director of the Nagara Institute, has said that the policy of the Daya Anagata Nusantara Investment Management Agency (BPI Danantara) to cut the number of state-owned enterprise (SOE) entities from more than 1,000 to around 200-300 companies is vital to reducing business overlap while strengthening the focus of state companies. Akbar said that all input from the Round Table Discussion (RTD) held by the Nagara Institute and Akbar Faizal Uncensored (AFU), titled ‘Hundreds of SOEs Forcibly Closed: The Final Gamble to Save State Business Units’, would be compiled as recommendations for President Prabowo.

‘We will produce a book containing critical notes which we will then hand over to the president,’ Akbar said in a written statement in Jakarta on Thursday (23/7/2026).

According to him, the process is a necessity so that criticism of government policy goes hand in hand with a deep understanding of the problems facing SOEs. Akbar believes the SOE slimming agenda could become an important moment for comprehensively repairing the structure of state companies.

‘With proper consolidation, BPI Danantara has the opportunity to reduce redundancy, strengthen performance, and optimise the contribution of state assets,’ Akbar said.

Wijayanto Samirin, an economics and public policy analyst at Paramadina University, said the decision by BPI Danantara to close irrelevant entities is the right step. In his view, the problem with SOEs has long lain in the difficulty of closing entities that no longer have any business relevance.

‘When the government established Danantara to trim and close what is not relevant, this is a very appropriate step,’ Wijayanto said.

Gde Sumarjaya Linggih, a member of Commission VI of the House of Representatives of the Republic of Indonesia (DPR), believes that establishing an SOE must fundamentally be based on strategic reasons and a development function. The state, he argued, needs to reassess entities running businesses that the private sector is actually capable of handling.

Demer, as Gde Sumarjaya Linggih is familiarly known, explained that SOEs in the past were formed on the basis of security needs, business scale, government assignments, and the development of underdeveloped regions. That framework, he said, is highly important as a reference for BPI Danantara as it restructures the national SOE landscape.