Indonesia Invites India to Build a Digital Economy Ecosystem

To accelerate the government's target to make Indonesia the largest digital economy in Southeast Asia by 2020, the government is now planning to cooperate with India in the field of digital economy development and e-commerce services.

Head of the Investment Coordinating Board (BKPM) Thomas T Lembong said Indonesia's opportunity to cooperate with India was quite large and very prospective, considering that the two countries were experiencing rapid development in this field.

He also considered several digital companies such as Tokopedia, Traveloka, and Go-Jek to be quite successful examples in Indonesia. The same thing happened in India, many successful digital companies were born there.

Not only that, Lembong saw that a number of local e-commerce companies had used the services of programmers and coders imported directly from the country of Bollywood. The goal is to solve the main problem of talent shortages according to industry needs.

"Indonesia is experiencing a shortage programmer when the growth of the digital economy in this country is booming. The same thing happened in India, but they can handle this problem," he said as quoted from Between.

According to Lembong, the cooperation with India can be fully implemented because India already has more experience in the development of information technology (IT). He assessed that this kind of cooperation would be very prospective for Indonesia.

Go-Jek is an example

Go-Jek is one of the digital startups that has recently been diligent in acquiring and hiring (acquire) Indian talent. In fact, Go-Jek's intention is even greater after inaugurating its representative office there under the name GoProducts Engineering India LLC.

Go-Jek CEO Nadiem Makariem said the opening of this office was closely related to the development of its services. The reason is that some of Go-Jek's programmers come from India. Go-Jek's CTO also often communicates with developers there, so that the new office is expected to develop services ride sharing can be done more quickly.

The opening of an office in India is also expected to be a step to find new developers and become a training center for all Go-Jek engineers, both from India and Indonesia.

"We have seen collaboration and knowledge sharing between our engineers in Indonesia and India. This has helped accelerate product innovation, data mining, and improve the consumer experience at Go-Jek," he was quoted as saying. Seconds.

At least this year Go-Jek has acquired four companies from India. Pianta, a company engaged in the home healthcare sector. Two tech consulting startups C42 and CodeIgnition. Lastly, product development startup LeftShift.