An Indonesian Perspective: A Real Opportunity

Five posts in and it's time to put the pieces together.

The series started with a simple conjecture: Australians know Indonesia better than almost any foreign market, and own less of it than almost any foreign investor.

Each post since tested one hypothesis for that gap against the data.

1. Where Australia Ranks: Do we know Indonesia, and do we own it? Australia sent Indonesia 1.75 million visitors in 2025, second only to Malaysia. On investment we ranked eighth, at US$0.7bn.
2. A Deeper Look: Is there a sector we lead? China leads base metals, Singapore services and transport, Malaysia paper, Japan vehicles, the United States mining. Australia leads none.
3. A Yield Story: Is it the returns? Indonesia paid foreign equity 9.6% a year from 2015 to 2025, fourth of ten. Ahead of the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, which hold more than a third of our capital abroad.
4. A Missing Link: Is it the capability? Financial services, mining and manufacturing are our three biggest sectors abroad and our three smallest in Indonesia. Mining is 19.6% of our capital abroad; over eleven years we made up 3.3% of mining investment in Indonesia. Manufacturing is 13.9% abroad and 0.21% in Indonesia.
5. A Ground Reality: Is it the rules? 100% foreign ownership is the default across most of the economy, and two in three of the 280 foreign-invested operations we sampled took an Indonesian partner anyway.

Put together, Indonesia is open, it pays, and it wants what Australia is good at. Yet of the A$1.2 trillion Australia holds abroad, A$2.0 billion sits in Indonesia.

Just to put that into perspective: that's 0.16%. A Lego brick standing next to a two-storey house.

Malaysia gets more than twice as much, Papua New Guinea 13 times as much, and New Zealand 74 times as much.

What's missing is the Jakarta street smarts: the data shows you'd best start with an operator on the ground, and an Indonesian partner beside it.

Key takeaways: The door's been open for decades and real returns are what brought in China, Singapore, Japan and the others. Maybe we're just too blinded by the Bali sunsets.