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Southeast Asia
Going mobile: Calling Indonesia
By Bill Guerin
JAKARTA - The collapse of the rupiah in 1998 left Indonesian telecommunication companies barely able to pay their dollar-denominated debts, let alone fund new investment. As neighbors across Asia signed up subscribers by the cart load, six of the total nine Indonesian cellular operators collapsed and AT&T Wireless Services and the Netherlands' KPN bailed out and left.
Now, despite the halting progress of the privatization program and a permanently cash-strapped government, the sector is showing very strong growth.
China outpaced the United States as the world's largest market for mobile phones two years ago, but the growth in Indonesia has been equally remarkable. Almost 20 million Indonesians now use mobile phones, equivalent to some 8 percent of the country's 220 million population. And the best is yet to come.
The country still has one of the lowest penetration rates in the Asia-Pacific region, the world's largest telecommunication market, with neighboring Malaysia, for example, having 36 percent and Thailand about 32 percent. As recently as 2001, only 1.7 percent of Indonesians had cellular phones, compared with 6 percent of Thais.
The market is expected to grow rapidly and even last year's growth of 2 percent was, pro rata, the largest in the region.
Currently there are 1.3 billion users worldwide, and most of the growth in the industry is expected to come from basic voice communications in emerging markets, including India, Indonesia, Brazil and Russia, Nokia chief Jorma Ollila said last month. About 4 billion people, half of the planet's total population, will be using mobile phon ...