The Indonesian authorities have "done a great job in negotiating with the COVID vaccine suppliers for advanced commitments," says today's Indo Tekno Podcast guest, Farouk Meralli of mClinica. "Where it's going to get very difficult is distribution. This is a logistics effort like we've never seen before."

mClinica is Southeast Asia's largest online pharmacy network. Its all-digital Trade and Patient solutions enable more than 40,000 pharmacies, who interact with 150 million patients, to operate more efficiently and effectively, both in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia. The traditional pharmacy is a center of activity unlike its counterpart in the West: in Southeast Asia, customers visit pharmacies 12x a year, and physicians only 1.2x a year. mClinica addresses the industry's profound fragmentation. Its SwipeRx pharmacy "super-app" solves several age-old challenges for mom-and-pop pharmacies, including: 1) the purchase of pharmaceuticals on discount, 2) access to credit, 3) frictionless payments and 4) direct delivery.

SwipeRx's  most popular features involve content and education. It is now SEA's largest education provider for pharmacy professionals. Farouk also profiles on our podcast how the world's leading pharma brands, regional governments and global NGO's also benefit from mClinica's many pharmacy-centric solutions.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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"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).

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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 funds

With 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.

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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.

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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."