We expect an increase in added value, employment, taxes, and of course, technological development. This development will result in higher efficiency. Indonesia will be one of the countries with the most unicorns in Asia or maybe globally since it provides a business-friendly environment. Hence, the strength of our digital economy will further expand its ecosystem.

Indonesia’s digital economy value in 2020 was around USD 40 billion and grew to USD 70 billion in 2021. This development is in-line with Industry 4.0 and digitalization in various sectors which are driven by the pandemic. For example, during the pandemic, the pre-work card program (Kartu Prakerja) was accessed by more than 70 million registrants in 512 cities. With the existing digital infrastructure, fully-digitalized Kartu Prakerja services could be accessed by the entire nation.

As more than 70% of the total population are internet users, Indonesia is on the list of countries with the most startups. State-owned Enterprises (BUMN) have driven a third of the country’s economy and are responsible for leading and making necessary breakthroughs in the future.

South Tangerang has high potential in two aspects: population growth and more educated populations. The captive market is already established, the local people are attentive to digital development, especially because the economic players are those performing in tertiary sectors, mainly trade and services.

The development of the digital industry has changed the need for workforces. The World Bank and McKinsey projected that between 2015 and 2030, Indonesia would need approximately nine million talented workforces in the digital sector. Therefore, we need a palpable breakthrough by the Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy/Department of Tourism and Creative Economy (Kemenparekraf/Baparekraf) embodied in the Baparekraf Developer Day and Baparekraf Digital Talent.

According to IDEA, from 30 million MSME targets in 2024, 16.4 million have gone digital. It is a tremendous acceleration as it reflects a 105% increase from the pre-pandemic, where only 8 million MSMEs have onboarded digital platforms. To reach the other 13.6 million, we will encourage micro-scale businesses with small production capacity to onboard local platforms instead of the global-scale unicorn e-commerce, to avoid competition with big brands.

A study conducted by the Ministry of Finance and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) entitled “Innovate Indonesia: Unlocking Growth Through Technological Transformation”, in which a survey conducted to 502 domestic companies, found that the level of technology adoption of companies in Indonesia is mostly in the basic category (64%), while for the advanced category, it is still relatively small (6%).