What are some of the pleasures and pitfalls of doing business in Indonesia?
A. The real pleasure is that it’s a good place to make money. Companies tend to be quite profitable here. The pitfalls are that it is highly bureaucratic, regulations can be confusing and sometimes implementation can be inconsistent. These things can be intimidating, especially for new-to-market people. But it’s also a very practical country where most problems get worked out, and not in a corrupt manner; most multinationals can do business here consistent with other codes of conduct around the world. It has a stereotype of not being a very efficient manufacturing economy, but that’s not true. There are exporters here, aside from the normal natural resource and commodity exporters, who are gaining market share and are reasonably competitive. Q. Has it become easier to do business here as Indonesia’s political system has stabilized into a relatively solid democracy? A. We’ve had pretty stable politics here for a decade now, since ’99. That’s certainly a big plus and one reason companies
