Indonesia

Although Indonesia may be home to more than 200m Muslims, its share of Islamic finance products compared to conventional financial instruments is still fairly small. With these specialised banking and financial services growing by as much as 20% per year, there remains significant potential for the country to capture a larger slice of this market...

In the past 15 years, spending on Indonesia’s education system has dramatically increased, along with enrolment rates. Indeed, basic education is now mandatory and in theory accessible to all, in line with one of the country’s Millennium Development Goals. Moreover, recently there have been great improvements in the quality of basic and, to some...

While there are a host of telecommunications providers serving various niches in Indonesia, three companies stand out as the biggest and most closely watched: Telkomsel, Indosat and XL Axiata. These are the three dominant GSM providers and it is their competition that sets the overall tone for the sector. Each have reported drops in some key...

With penetration rates nearing 100% and network coverage encompassing almost all of the country, Indonesia’s wireless communications sector is approaching maturity. Furthermore, average revenue per user is falling and the main providers are now looking for other ways to keep profits from sagging. It is at this point in the development of a wireless...

Adverse weather has hit the world’s third largest cocoa producer hard the past two years, first with La Niña bringing copious amounts of rain followed by a dry spell from May to August 2011 and a prolonged infestation of damaging cascular-streak dieback disease. These extremes have put the brakes on production and exports, which had been...