Indonesia: A tiger cub learning to roar

Indonesia: A tiger cub learning to roar

Like other developing countries, Indonesia's economic growth has brought with it unprecedented problems. Businessman Tan Bien Kiat takes a look at this issue.

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia is an emerging tiger -- some call it a tiger cub. With its steady growth and well-managed economy -- Indonesia is hot on the heels of the other tigers. Consequently, a consumer boom is occurring. Coupled with globalization and the technology revolution, a new class of consumers is emerging, one which is more demanding of quality consumer products, more eager to learn and access better information.

This phenomenon has led to two paradoxes in Indonesia. The first paradox: The same consumers who are increasingly demanding world class products and services are the same employees in companies (state-owned and private alike) who need to be more efficient and productive.

Indonesian consumers have been lured by trappings of luxury consumer products and electronics such as designer clothing and accessories, handphones, microwave ovens, laser disc players, and automotive. These items have become common sight in the middle income home. They are manufactured by fiercely competitive companies from the United States, Japan, Germany, and Korea, who are racing to innovate the next generation of products with better features, more reliability and better performance. To top it all, they are priced similar to or even lower than its previous generation.

As consumers in Indonesia, we have come to take all this for granted. Yet how did this actually occur? These competitively- priced and attractive consumer products have been made possible through the process of global competition -- companies having to strive for world class performance and to compete for survival. Employees of these multinational world class companies have to continually develop new ideas, work against tough deadlines, raise their skills and productivity levels. For many of these employees -- these are their daily challenges, just to retain their jobs.

Yet many of the same Indonesian consumers are employees. The government has recently called for state-owned companies to improve their performance and competitiveness by declaring that "state enterprises will be deregulated and privatized to compete with private companies". Employees need to raise their productivity and efficiency to achieve tangible results for their companies. Private companies are not excluded, they are being benchmarked against their public-listed competitors and have to increasingly compete with multinational firms.

As we come to expect and enjoy these "world class products" do we understand what it takes to produce them? Can the Indonesian consumer reconcile his lifestyle expectations with his performance as an employee of a company that competes with world class companies?

The second paradox concerns the quest for information and learning. With the advent of personal computers and the Internet, information around the globe can now be accessed instantaneously while it might have taken weeks or even months in the past. Companies, educational and research institutions, knowledge workers, researchers, and students alike find this "information revolution" a joy. Barriers to learning are broken down, cognitive processes are compressed, gaps between developed and developing nations narrowed. Properly utilized and harnessed, the Indonesian researcher and businessman can gain much ground on his counterpart in the developed world by easily accessing knowledge, information, know-how and contacts.

For example, a corn farmer in Lampung can now network with his counterparts in the mid-west of America via the Internet to exchange ideas on advanced techniques to improve corn yields, farm productivity and disease prevention. He can also check with commodity trading houses in Hamburg and Singapore to find out the spot price trends and future contracts for corn.

In this way, as long as the farmer can link into the Internet server line in Jakarta, he can gain access to information around the globe to enhance his farm operations and improve his returns. In the past, finding the right people to contact, language barriers and prohibitive costs of international telephone charges would have been the main obstacles.

Yet this powerful tool has to be controlled. ASEAN Ministers of Information recently met in Singapore to deliberate on how to deal with the proliferation of Internet. They are concerned about the "dark side" of this information technology revolution, such as pornography, offensive writings and graphics, attacks on governments and individuals which can now be easily perpetuated and proliferated. The ASEAN ministers are grappling with the kind of policies that should be established to police the underworld of cyberspace.

Governments, institutions and parents, all face this dilemma of how to accelerate learning and networking without being exposed to the risks of uninhibited flow of information. This is the second paradox.

Like the other tigers, Indonesia has to deal with the two paradoxes. They are natural and healthy signs of development. The only difference is -- when the Indonesian tiger cub grows up, it is going to be larger than other tigers and the paradoxes will become more evident.

The writer is the chief operating officer of Ometraco Corporation, Jakarta.