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)