Nielsen recently published their Digital Consumer Whitepaper for South East Asia, and there are several interesting things they find about the Indonesian market.
First, Singapore has the highest Internet penetration at 67 percent, whilst Indonesia trails the region with just 21 percent penetration. Although 21 percent is not a big of a number, but it’s still 53 million people which is a lot bigger than most countries in the region. This huge market is slowly growing at the annual rate of around 20%.
Nielsen also found that In Indonesia, ownership of an internet-capable mobile phone is more than double that of desktop or notebook computers. Internet-capabe mobile phone is a huge thing in Indonesia, although most people in the industry is still focusing on the “smartphone” market but I think this will change soon, especially looking at the huge number of web-enabled white-label phones.
In Indonesia the mobile phone is now the most popular means of accessing the internet, being cited by a significant proportion of the digital population (43%) as the single, main device for internet access. Indonesia skipped the PC age and went straight on with mobile phones to access the internet. Although the rest of the digital population still maintain access via laptop or computers at work.
In Indonesia, social media activities make up the four most frequently undertaken activities, with private messages on social networking sites the most popular. Browsing online profiles and emails is also on the top #5 most popular digital activity for Indonesian users, this behavior is somewhat consistent with other market in the region. Although there are other popular activities such as gaming, chatting, news, and search.
You can view the full PDF report by Nielsen here.
