Four more companies join KualiVa

Four more companies join KualiVa

JAKARTA (JP): Four companies joined KualiVa, a business
alliance that promotes the member firms' products and services by
offering savable discounts, on Saturday.

The agreements on the KualiVa membership were signed here by
eight members of KualiVa's executive council, led by Hari
Darmawan, and representatives of the four companies -- PT Grita
Artha Kreamindo, PT Skytelindo Services, PT Persada Komindo and
PT Raya Pertiwi Semesta.

Grita Artha Kreamindo is a franchisee of 5 a'Sec, a French
laundry company. The Indonesian company's 10 outlets in Jakarta
have a revenue of Rp 7 million per day. The other three companies
operate the SkyTel, NusaPage and Multipage paging services
respectively.

Before the participation of the four firms, KualiVa had nine
member companies -- PT Gramedia Asri, a bookstore chain; PT
Modern Putra Indonesia, a photography company; PT Matahari Putra
Prima, a department store owner; PT Hero Supermarket, a
supermarket chain; the airline PT Sempati Air; PT Bank Bali;
Accor Asia Pacific Indonesia, a hotel chain; telecommunications
company PT Satelit Palapa Indonesia; and PT Meganusa Lintas
Buana, an Internet provider.

KualiVa was founded in August 1995 by a number of businessmen
to promote their products and services by offering discounts in
the form of points, each worth Rp 1. Points can be accumulated by
buying the products or services of any of the members.

There are currently 700,000 KualiVa card holders who have made
total transactions of Rp 25 billion since the start of the
program.

"We aim to attract 1 million card holders with total
transactions of about Rp 100 billion by the end of this year,"
said Rudy Ramli, president of Bank Bali.

Hari said KualiVa, which has pledged to set aside 0.25 percent
of each transaction using a KualiVa card for social donations,
had collected Rp 206.6 million for charity.

When pressed on the fact that the charity funds were much less
than 0.25 percent of the total transactions, Rudy said that some
of the funds was used to finance other programs, including
promotion. (10)