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 "Our advantage is our people," states George Hendrata, CEO of Indonesian online travel agent (OTA) Tiket.com. The term "people" in fact comes up no less than 30 times in our interview, more than four times as frequently as the average guest on the Indo Tekno podcast. This philosophy, quite common throughout the broader Djarum Group, espouses not just Tiket.com employees, but also the platform's obsession with customer service.  Tiket.com seeks to democratize travel for the average Indonesian, and make it fun and effortless. The company's employee and customer-centricity however has been put to the test in 2020. The recently released Google-Temasek-Bain report anticipates a near 60% decline in the Southeast Asia OTA segment in 2020. Tiket.com has sought to avoid headcount reductions despite the unprecedented headwinds that the pandemic has fanned. George notes that the "green shoots" of recovery have recently sprouted up in the form of a gradual rebound in domestic travel.Although George views competition in OTA as much more "sane" that in e-commerce and ride hailing, the company has had to defer plans to break-even in 2020 for another couple years due to COVID. But Tiket.com is optimistic around the prospects of industry recovery in 2021 from this year's USD14b, en route to a longer term Google-Temasek forecast of USD60b for the region by 2025.(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)

Nearly 50% of grocery delivery customers in the past six months had never used such services prior to COVID, according to the new Google Temasek Bain "e-Conomy SEA 2020" report. In this episode, we invite on Guillem Segarra, CEO of HappyFresh. Guillem discusses this radical growth in demand; how HappyFresh as the region's leading pure-play has dealt with an influx of competition from Gojek, Grab and others; and what the future looks like for Indonesia's supermarkets.Having adopted an asset-light model that connects brick-and-mortar grocery stores to customers, HappyFresh's trinity of priorities is: 1) selection, 2) ease-of-use and 3) value-for-money. The company's marketplace approach enables easy scaling and profitable unit economics, leaving consistency of experience and customer satisfaction as crucial initiatives in competing with its more asset-heavy, vertically-integrated competition.The 2021 plan is to help deepen the digital sophistication of its supermarket partners, expand geographically and grow its intimacy with the customer through loyalty programs and the like, as HappyFresh pursues a share of what should be a USD10b market by 2025.(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)

Credit card ownership in Indonesia has risen at an anaemic 2.3% CAGR over the past 10 years, this despite an absolute burgeoning in use cases such as e-commerce and other forms of consumption in the country. JP Morgan for instance last year estimated that there were a mere 0.59 e-commerce enabled debit cards per capita and 0.07 e-commerce enabled credit cards per capita in Indonesia. Our guest this week is Akshay Garg, Cofounder and CEO of FinAccel, which operates Kredivo, its flagship “Buy now, Pay later” solution. Akshay reflects on the company's dual obsession with: a) improving access to credit for Indo consumers and b) reducing e-commerce payment frictions. Akshay views an early call to build Kredivo's own tech stack in areas such as credit scoring as invaluable to the company's dominance in the space, both as an e-commerce check-out option and across other Point-of-Sale (POS) use cases.While COVID drove a sudden 50% decline in activity earlier this year, Akshay indicates that Kredivo's business is now at better than pre-COVID levels.  The pandemic had slowed regional expansion, but Akshay expects to add 1-2 markets over the next several months, while looking into new lines such as education & healthcare loan products.Competition in online payments is intense. And while the "buy-now-pay-later" space similarly remains competitive, Kredivo intends to deepen its symbiosis with Indonesia's leading e-commerce platforms as a leading check-out solution, much in the same way PayPal has in the US, or Klarna has in Europe.(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)...

"I try to spend every day...with somebody who is in the tech space," comments Pak Gita Wirjawan. This week's guest to the Indo Tekno Podcast brings to bear insights from a sweeping career which ranges from government service at the highest levels, to extensive involvement in Indonesia's tech ecosystem as entrepreneurial investor and mentor.Most widely known as Indonesia's Minister of Trade from 2011 to 2014, Gita Wirjawan reflects on the broad tapestry of interests that he began to weave from early youth; from winning golf tournaments while living with family in Bangladesh at the age of 13, to his appearance on no less than 14 albums regaling audiences as an award-winning jazz performer during his stint in the US. Gita's greatest passion centers on education. His Ancora Foundation has a mission of helping both early stage education and graduate studies for talented Indonesians. Gita also mentors a large number of Indonesia's rising "technopreneurs" on a daily basis. Some of his conversations with young leaders of Indonesia's tech world are featured on Gita's popular podcast "Endgame."Gita remains extremely optimistic about Indonesia's longer term economic prospects, but differs with some of his peers in his belief that digging out of the COVID crater may take multiple years, not months. Gita is hopeful that the new Omnibus Law will benefit Indonesia's tech sector, and more broadly help lift the country from current levels of $91 worth of FDI (foreign direct investment) per capita, closer those of Malaysia ($270) or Singapore ($19,000).(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)...

(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)...While the average Indonesian has always had an appreciation of gold as a reliable investment, the ravages of COVID have driven massive volumes into this "safe haven" asset. The user base of Indonesia's leading digital gold and investment platform Pluang for instance has grown a stunning 20 times since the start of the pandemic. Gold moreover has returned 36% over the past year in Rupiah terms. Our guest on Indo Tekno, Pluang cofounder Claudia Kolonas, discusses both this exciting corner of Indonesia's FinTech scene, while also reflecting on the many challenges that face the female entrepreneur in Indonesia.As a student at Harvard Business School, Claudia and her cofounder began on working on a business plan with inspiration from an HBS course titled "Business at the Base of the Pyramid." Pluang's focus is on unbanked, first-time investors in Indonesia and, as such, it collaborates extensively with strategic partners such as Gojek to improve digital and financial literacy amongst these first time investors. The platform enables investment in Sharia-compliant digital gold products. Pluang meanwhile has its sites set on other traditional financial products such as equity indices, fixed income products and mutual fundsWith women representing only 22% of Indonesia's tech workforce (far below the region's 32%),  Claudia exhorts employers to consider expanding support of working women in the form of on-site daycare and other facilities. She meanwhile counsels aspiring female entrepreneurs to be brave and "outspoken", and to "lean in" to opportunities and be ready to grab what they can.

Indonesia's and China's technology ecosystems continue to interweave and overlap. BAce Capital is a venture firm whose very mission is to connect markets such as Indonesia to China's dynamic tech eco-system. Claiming Ant Financial as its anchor LP, the firm was founded by Ant and Alibaba veterans Benny Chen and "KK" Kshitij Karundia. In this instalment of Sino Indo Tekno, Benny reflects on the many benefits that the Indonesian entrepreneur can realize in working closely with his/her counterparts in China. The founding team of BAce played key roles in higher profile Alibaba and Ant Financial investments such as Lazada and Tokopedia in Indonesia, and PayTM and Zomato in India. BAce invests in an Indonesian start-up if the partners can easily connect that company to longer term learning relationships with: 1) Alibaba and Ant Financial themselves (China's absolute leaders in e-commerce and fintech, respectively),  and 2) some of the hundreds of investee companies within Ant and Alibaba's broader ecosystems. How do companies in China scale? What are best practices in product development? What are the most powerful ways to leverage big data?  Benny profiled a number of activities that his team has arranged for BAce Indonesian portfolio companies such as Printerous and RoomMe. Learning visits to meet industry peers in China helped answer questions such as those above, while focused workshops on Chinese COVID mitigation techniques offered these companies valuable coping mechanisms for the pandemic. In his concluding remarks, Benny suggests that continuous improvements in Indonesian infrastructure and expansion in digital payments & logistics are key to driving further online growth.

(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)Our guest this week, Pandu Sjahrir, is one of Indonesia's best known tech investors and operating executives. Actively involved in the management of four leading companies, Pandu was also recently appointed Board Member of the Indonesia Stock Exchange (or IDX). He joins us to outline the growing attractions of IPO'ing on the IDX for Indonesia's tech start-up's. Pandu describes his main mandate as "hunting Indonesian elephants": he is actively encouraging Indo's largest tech companies to list domestically in the belief that, with such valuable precedent, the IDX will be able to eventually develop a thriving ecosystem of listed tech companies. The benefits of listing domestically to the tech entrepreneur he argues are numerous: from valuable MSCI index inclusion (and thus demand from absolutely massive pools of passive moneys), to the fiscal attractions of a 0.1%-0.5% capital gains tax, to a declining corporate income tax and the support of dual class shares.Pandu views recent recent mix shifts on the IDX over the past year as very positive: retail accounts have doubled to 3.2m and local investors have risen from 45% to 60% of market ownership. He also candidly discusses where Indo's IPO ecosystem needs to mature, in areas such as board membership, governance and transparency of reporting.Pandu also shares generously other insights from his various current roles as Chairman of Sea Group Indonesia, Managing Director of alternative asset manager Indies Capital, Founding Partner of leading early stage venture fund ACVentures, and CFO of leading mining group Toba Bara Sejahtra. The pandemic has revealed the real grit and leadership amongst Pandu's most talented entrepreneurs, and punished those with more mercenary intentions. Pandu's advice for the IPO aspirant: now is the time to consider an IPO, but be sure to prepare for scrutiny and other new challenges.

We are pleased to invite back to Indo Tekno studios Andy Tai, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, in order to explore the SPAC ("Special Purpose Acquisition Company") as a means of bringing promising Indonesian tech companies to the public markets. This marks the second episode of our "From Warung to Wall Street" podcast series.A SPAC is a company which, at the outset has no commercial operations. It is formed strictly to raise capital through an initial public offering (IPO) for the purpose of acquiring an existing company. Also known as "blank check companies," SPACs have been around for decades. However, it is only recently that discussions around the opportunity for SPAC's to support the public listing of promising Indo and SEA tech companies have resurged, with the September 24th announcement of the Bridgetown SPAC. Backed by billionaire entrepreneur and VC Peter Thiel, Bridgetown seeks to raise $575 million, and intends to invest the proceeds in "new economy” start-up's in Southeast Asia.Andy estimates that an astounding 125 SPAC's have been raised in 2020 year-to-date, representing over $40 billion in funds raised. Roughly half of these SPAC's have a tech angle to their story. Please join us while Andy walks us through the opportunities, and challenges, that the SPAC represents for Indonesia's start-up's and the investors that support them.

(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)FACT: Indonesia spends only 3.0% of its GDP on healthcare. The US spends 17.1%. China spends 5.2%.FACT: According to the World Health Organization, Indonesia has a mere 0.4 physicians per 1,000 people. The US has 2.6, while China has 2.Today's guest, Jonathan Sudharta, Cofounder and CEO of leading healthtech platform Halodoc, indicates that COVID has further accelerated the Indonesian government's plans to increase healthcare spend from 2.3% of GDP currently, to a target of 5%. The pandemic for instance has driven up usage of the Halodoc platform by an astonishing six times since earlier this year.Halodoc's basic mission is to simplify access to healthcare using the latest in technology. Working with over 20,000 doctors and more than 4,000 pharmacies in Indonesia, Halodoc currently boasts about 18 million monthly active users on the patient side. The value proposition for the medical professional is extremely powerful: newly onboarded physicians can consult up to 150 patients a day online. Halodoc's longer term mission, in Jonathan's words, is "to eliminate and reinvent everything that is not true healthcare (inordinate wait times, paperwork, administrative overhead, etc), around the healthcare itself."

(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)The term “tenacity” seems to be the one attribute that today’s guest has shown at every major point in her career. Gita Sjahrir, CEO of R Fitness, describes how a debilitating case of rheumatoid arthritis helped inform her decision to become one of Jakarta’s most dynamic entrepreneurs in the health and wellness space. Tenacity also clearly came into play as Gita navigated no less than 65 rejections on her path to becoming Southeast Asia's first fitness brand to raise VC funding. Eschewing the “Lululemon-wearing girls who can afford anything,” Gita sought to introduce brands that “can be enjoyed by most stratas of society.” Her new offering “Pod”, for instance, is one of the most affordable gyms in all of Indonesia. At only IDR25,000 per hour, the gym also offers Wi Fi, towels and all of the basic needs available at more expensive establishments.The onset of COVID has “helped us become a better company” says Gita, acting to accelerate R Fitness’ launch of its online business. An active student of languages and voracious reader, Gita does not bemoan the challenges that face female entrepreneurs. “You may have to work three, four or five times harder than male entrepreneurs” Gita says, exhorting female tech aspirants to “think of a marathon…look at all your limitations and see them as a way for you to become better than you already are.”

In our new series “Hari-Hari Awal” (in English, “The Early Days”), we begin to explore companies that have emerged over the years as defining pillars of the Indonesian internet ecosystem. Our inaugural instalment follows the rise of Tokopedia from its very first days, through its path to becoming far and away Indonesia’s most dominant native e-commerce platform today. Tokopedia Cofounder and Vice Chairman Leontinus Alpha Edison joins us with a wealth of anecdotes from the company’s hari-hari awal. Now a massive marketplace with 90+ million MAU (Monthly Active Users) and roughly 9 million merchants, Tokopedia’s rise maps the evolution of e-commerce from a simple online price comparison tool to an increasingly critical driver of growth to the Indonesian economy. Leon offers a refreshingly candid account of the ups-and-downs of building a platform from scratch. From the dark days of massive database outages, to the excitement of being the first to market with new payments solutions, the Tokopedia story is one of intense humility, dogged persistence and ceaseless experimentation.Leon himself is currently largely focused on cultivating the company’s future leaders. He concludes by detailing what Tokopedia has done to support the small merchant in the midst of the COVID pandemic, offering some of the most profound examples of Tokopedia’s renowned sense of mission.We hope you enjoy Episode 15 of Indo Tekno, and our first instalment of “Hari-Hari Awal!”

Indonesia is the world’s second largest producer of fish. Our guest Gibran Huzaifah and his company eFishery are out to leverage technology in order to disintermediate centuries of inefficient practices and waste that have crept into the industry.Indonesia has 3.3m fish farmers, many of whom barely scrape by. They are wedged between uneconomical fish feed pricing as their main input on one hand, and margins that disappear as they sell their fish into a labyrinth of downstream middlemen on the other hand. By implementing a group-buying scheme, eFishery can often secure 8-10% savings on the procurement of fish feed. Fish feed ultimately represents 70-90% of the fish farmer’s costs. The platform meanwhile can help the fish seller capture 25% higher product pricing by cutting out middlemen and connecting the farmer directly to restaurants and other downstream customers.eFishery has deployed tens of thousands of its IoT-based sensors as part of its “Feeding-as-a-Service" business model. The vibration-based sensors detect the movement of the fish to pinpoint when they're hungry or full. A massive amount of data is generated from both from this process of automating fish husbandry, and in assisting the farmer to buy feed and sell fish. Much of the future roadmap for eFishery lies in credit scoring and the provisioning of loans and other financial services. Gibran also discussed at length the manifold forms of collaboration with Gojek that affiliate GoVentures’ investment into eFishery has enabled; from powering payments across the spectrum to enabling the direct sale of fish to restaurants, hotels and other establishments by leveraging the Gojek fleet and the GoFood ecosystem. Longer term, eFishery sees broad business development opportunities in markets ranging from Vietnam to India, Bangladesh, and Thailand.We hope you enjoy this episode of Indo Tekno!

Ant Financial’s IPO filing last week revealed that the Chinese fintech juggernaut currently boasts more than one billion annual active users, offering a glimpse into how utterly pervasive online financial services could become in markets such as Indonesia.Indonesia’s fintech scene indeed continues to grow strongly by most measures, and this week’s Indo Tekno guest, Anderson Sumarli, CEO and Cofounder of Ajaib, is helping to lead this charge. Ajaib is an investing platform that allows Indonesians to buy and sell stocks, ETFs, mutual funds and other retail financial products. The company activated 200,000+ new retail investors in Indonesia in 2019, contributing one-quarter of all new retail investors in Indonesia last year.The pandemic has moreover served to accelerate further Indonesia’s online retail investment boom. As an example, the daily average number of Indonesian retail stock investors transacting online surged by more than 82% in the four months between March 2020 and July 2020 alone, from 51,000 to 93,000 investors. The simplest and most powerful component to Anderson’s vision of longer term secular growth in online retail investment is the fact that Indonesia has the largest capital markets in Southeast Asia but perversely has one of the world's lowest investment penetration rates, at less than 1%. There is one demographic that will continue driving the searing growth in this segment: Indonesia's mobile-first, digitally native millennials. They have proven particularly responsive to new "technology-first" trading platforms such as Ajaib. Unlike their parents, this group prefers a stock broker that is branchless, fully online and "mobile-first." As a technology-intensive, asset light online broker, Ajaib is able to offer zero commissions on mutual funds, and the lowest fees in the market for stock trading.Anderson also addressed one of the most widely discussed transactions within Indonesia’s broader financial landscape this year, namely Ajaib’s acquisition of traditional securities broker PT Primasia Sekuritas, discussing plans around integrating services, personnel and other parts of the two businesses. The most alluring challenge facing players such as Ajaib remains a profound lack of financial literacy amongst retail investors. The platform has built the country’s largest repository of investment content in the Indonesian language in order to tackle this challenge. While Ajaib has an extensive roadmap of new products laid out over the next several months, its longer term mission is to leverage technology for two main purposes: 1) broadening educational initiatives around retail investing while 2) improving affordability to all. 

Trucking in Indonesia is clearly ripe for disintermediation: annual logistics spend represents a massive 26% of GDP. The sector moreover is profoundly fragmented: 75% of trucking companies have 20 trucks or less, and a massive amount of the USD38b in annual trucking spend disappears into a labyrinth of middlemen. Tiger Fang, Co-founder & CEO at Kargo Technologies, joins us this week to discuss in greater detail this massive opportunity, and the attendant challenges that come with it.Having started his career in investment banking, Tiger early on developed an appreciation of the awesome power of "leverage" (financial leverage, technological leverage) in driving profound change into operationally intense industries such as logistics and e-commerce.  Tiger is a veteran of massive platform launches into new markets. He for instance built out Uber in Western China. At one point, provincial capital Chengdu was in fact Uber's busiest urban market globally. He also helped launch Rocket and Lazada operations into Thailand and Vietnam. Founded less than two years ago, Kargo has already deployed its "marketplace model", which aggregates supply and demand between Transporters and Shippers, initially across the dominant markets of Sumatra, Java and Bali (80% of Indo GDP) and beyond. Tiger believes Kargo to have one of the most robust R&D teams on the Indonesian tech scene, an achievement with which he credits co-founder and CTO Yodi Aditya. The two leaders view preserving a robust culture as critical to ensuring healthy growth going forward.While truckers are unlikely to become first adopters of cutting edge technology, Tiger has been pleased with uptake of Kargo's platform in Indonesia, and attributes it primarily to its effectiveness in reducing a trucker's down time, improving earnings power and, most importantly, easing working capital challenges for a sector that usually gets paid only 1-3 months after the delivery of goods.While COVID-19 has led to significant disruptions to the Indonesian trucking sector, Kargo's use of big data has been critical in creating greater market efficiency and liquidity on the platform. Tiger is particularly excited about the steady stream of "financing-as-a-service" offerings that Kargo plans to unveil over the coming months.Please enjoy this week's twelfth episode of Indo Tekno!

When listening to Bram Viktor's personal story of achievement as an entrepreneur, Winston Churchill's famous quote comes to mind:“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm." Bram's enthusiasm and entrepreneurial vigour are indeed infectious. He self-deprecatingly attributes his unquenchable desire to build and innovate in his early years to a mix of "stupidity and self-confidence." It is however very clear that many more factors came into play in building one of Indonesia's first fintech companies, Taralite, a P2P lending SME lending platform purchased by Fintech leader Ovo early last year.Bram eventually moved on from Ovo to launch Hangry, Indonesia's first multi-brand virtual restaurant company, late last year. Bram reflects on the importance of mentors in his drive to become a better entrepreneur and better leader. Tokopedia Founder William Tanuwijaya has played such a role in Bram's career. He also describes the best VC's as those who are willing to give "a slap to our right and left cheeks to wake us up when we're not looking at things right". A good VC however is a partner who can also empathise, unlike those who might see entrepreneurial investment in a strictly transactional way.When asked what elements that tech ecosystem needs in order to to become more robust, Bram believes that participants need to become more comfortable with taking risk, and learn to treat failure, and those who fail, with "respect and admiration."Bram's final advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: 1) be absolutely dogged in your search for product-market fit, and 2) think about sharing more of the upside your company with your colleagues; it could be through a more generous ESOP plan, or by other means...but do the right thing,We hope you enjoy the first instalment of our "Profiles in Entrepreneurialism" series, whereby we seek to interview Indonesia's growing crop of serial tech entrepreneurs.

Indonesian grab-and-go coffee chain Kopi Kenangan has grown to more than 350 stores in less than three years; a scale that global juggernaut Starbucks for instance took 23 years to achieve. Kopi Kenangan's growth moreover has been achieved with consistent profitability at both the store and company levels. Kopi Kenangan Cofounder and CEO Edward Tirtanata joins the Indo Tekno podcast to walk us through the unique balancing act of blitz-scaling while preserving key elements such as company culture and customer satisfaction. Despite the ongoing challenges of COVID-19, Kopi Kenangan continues to grow rapidly, and profitably, at the pace of roughly 30 new stores per month. Having founded Kopi Kenangan's first outlet amidst three of its biggest competitors, Edward believes that squaring off early with competition is imperative in order to accelerate product-market fit, and ensure the ability to scale successfully. Having originally risen to popularity in its ability to offer high quality coffee at an affordable price, Edward envisions successively layering new offerings on top of the current menu. Kopi Kenangan's broader mantra is "Product is king...but distribution is God." We indeed expect the company to expand its portfolio of drink and food options going forward as one of Indonesia's most dynamic channels to the workday customer. Edward also touches upon the importance of technology; it has driven order frequency and average order value (AOV), and has been a powerful enabler in customer targeting as part of its new loyalty programs.Edward wraps up by offering the following useful advice to young entrepreneurs in the consumer tech space: do not compromise in your early pursuit of product-market fit. It is essential in managing customer acquisition costs, and in ensuring scalability longer term.Please enjoy this, our 10th Indo Tekno podcast!

Welcome to this week’s “podcast on Indo podcasting”. Yes, this podcast is devoted to Indonesia's podcasting industry. As we established last week with our coverage of the country's streaming video industry, online media is one of the most promising parts of Indonesia's consumer internet. This week, we continue our "Sino Indo Tekno" sub-series with partner Art Dicker of the Shanghai-based Gan Bei podcast to interview Tyo Guritno, founder of leading Indonesian podcasting platform Inspigo. During the podcast, we compare and contrast Inspigo with its counterparts in China, including the massive Ximalaya platform with more than 500m registered users. China podcasting derives revenues largely from "pay-per" content, subscription plans and virtual gifts. Tyo on the other hand expects advertising to drive Indo podcasting revenues, although early paid trials on Inspigo have also shown encouraging results. While the initial appeal of podcasting in Indonesia centered on entertainment, the COVID-19 pandemic has led many listeners to seek self-improvement programming (which is China's largest category). More uniquely to Indonesia, mindfulness has become a massive category in the stressful pandemic period. Tyo expects Inspigo to continue to deliver a broad amalgam of content, from "UGC" (user generated content) to "PGC" (professionally generated content). Successful entrepreneurs, university professors, television personalities and a range of "grass roots" personalities top the charts as hosts of both Chinese and Indonesian podcasting. Our session also included an interesting dialogue between Art and Tyo comparing "content moderation" and censorship techniques to ensure that podcasting does not fall afoul of laws and regulations in China and Indonesia.We hope you enjoy this latest instalment of "Sino Indo Tekno"! 

Indonesia seems primed to leapfrog into the online media age. With only 0.6 movie screens per 100,000 in population (or roughly 1/20th of US levels), consumption of video-on-demand has skyrocketed this year, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic has kept people at home, and offline theaters have closed their doors.This week's guest, GoPlay CEO Edy Sulistyo, believes that the premium video-on-demand platform possesses three critical elements in capturing Indonesia's elusive multibillion dollar streaming media crown:A deep commitment to cultivating premium local contentA wide array of new business models in partnering with content ownersIntense collaboration with Indonesian tech behemoth GojekThe Indonesian audience will spend a mere $84 per capita on entertainment and media in 2021. This is a tiny fraction of the $2,300 that the average American is likely to spend. As Indonesia's online media spend grows, how does one win outsized wallet share? This is a question that remained unanswered after the recent demise of two major regional streaming platforms.Edy outlined a number of important strategies. Only 35% of films in Indonesia were locally produced in 2018, versus nearly 65% in China. Edy envisions domestically produced content crossing 50% shortly, and it should climb higher as GoPlay and others work steadily to improve the quality of local programming. Key to this encouraging growth will also be the various revenue sharing models that GoPlay has refined since being founded in 2018. One of the single largest blockers to online media consumption has been a lack of viable payment options. GoPlay's surging subscriber numbers owe in large part to its tight integration within the Gojek ecosystem and the convenience of GoPay as a means of paying for content. Just as powerful is GoPlay's ability to leverage big data being generated across the Gojek ecosystem to be able to target users effectively.We hope you enjoy this, Episode 8, of the Indo Tekno podcast!

Indonesia has one of the world's lowest insurance penetration rates at 1.79%. This situation is set to change, dramatically...Indeed, Indonesian insurance adoption seems ready to advance rapidly behind the innovations of industry leaders such as our guest this week, Cleosent Randing, and his InsurTech platform, PasarPolis. PasarPolis and its industry peers are dealing with a totally clean slate, in that Indonesia is largely new to both offline and online insurance. Cleo details how the company has grown to its current pace of 50m policies per month, largely by removing traditional frictions to insurance adoption. For instance, a Gojek driver, Tokopedia customer, or Traveloka passenger can subscribe to any number of "micro-insurance" products with just a few clicks. This ease of insuring even the smallest of products or activities has been key to courting the digitally savvy millennial customer, on PasarPolis' way toward accessing an estimated $3b opportunity longer term. Cleo steps through a number of fascinating examples, from "contextual insurance" products with Gojek, to total loss insurance offerings on the Tokopedia e-commerce platform. in illustrating all of the barriers to adoption that players such as PasarPolis have taken down.According to Cleo, PasarPolis benefits from three clear tailwinds in driving online insurance adoption: First, a positive Indonesian regulatory stance around InsurTech has been key to educating and promoting insurance products to Indonesia's population. Secondly, the challenges that COVID-19 has thrown at the offline incumbent insurers allows PasarPolis; with a clear, complementary, partnership-oriented approach in working with Indonesia's offline insurance giants; to move products online, while also creating totally new digital solutions with its many partners. Third but not least, is the massive impact that smartphone adoption has had on the immediate accessibility, and the precise targeting, customization and pricing of insurance that individuals have as they step through through their day.We hope you enjoy this, the seventh episode of Indo Tekno!

"Sino Indo Tekno" is a new collaboration with leading China technology authority Art Dicker and his Shanghai-based Gan Bei podcast. Sino Indo Tekno will air regularly to address the growing interconnectedness of the China and Indonesia technology worlds.In our first instalment of Sino Indo Tekno, we feature Helen Wong, Partner at leading Chinese VC Qiming Ventures. Qiming is one of China's first major venture investors into Indonesia. Helen compares and contrasts Indonesia today with the early days of the China internet, when internet platforms such as Sina and Sohu first disintermediated the media industry, while their peers eventually went on to change the face of banking, healthcare and other verticals in China. Helen sees a different evolution for Indonesia. She goes on to profile a number of China-Indonesia synergies that have emerged in the internet space, but at the same time Helen expects Indonesia to produce its own champions in areas such as AgriTech, Muslim fashion and Sharia finance.We discuss with Helen common mistakes in blindly copying China models to Indonesia. Helen also addresses major questions such as: Using China as a guide, when will the Indo subsidy wars end? Will Indonesian consumers become good paying subscribers? Will Sino-US tensions benefit the Indonesian tech ecosystem? Will the Alibaba-Tencent rivalry spill over into Indo? How will early stage Indo start-up valuations trend?Please tune this new sub-series of the Indo Tekno podcast!