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Why Companies Like Facebook and Google Don’t Really Need To Be In Indonesia

1 min read
July 18, 2011

While attending the IDByte conference the other day, there’s one question that was consistently asked to keynote speakers from Facebook, Google and LinkedIn by the audience.

“Why you guys haven’t set up your office in Indonesia?”.

I won’t argue on how ridiculous and pathetic this question really is, but I will try to map out the reason why these big companies doesn’t have to open their office in Indonesia in the first place.

Google is currently entering the market, they’ve been roaming around the cities in Indonesia and meet with lots of people, doing events, recruit people and do some business activities even though they haven’t legally incorporated.

Of course, the perfect argument to persuade Facebook and Google to open their office in Indonesia is because they have big user base in the country. They have to be here, right? Wrong. They don’t need to, because Indonesia is mostly consumer market where they aren’t making that much money from the people. Of course they have ads to sell, but they already have resellers operating in the country. The investment and effort to set up an office in Indonesia compared to the benefit just doesn’t make any business sense for them.

If the reason is to boost the market growth in Indonesia, it’s still not a good idea because Indonesian people don’t care! Even if Facebook, Twitter and Google don’t have an office here, that won’t stop using the service and the number of new users just keep growing organically. Google and Facebook are the top 5 site in Indonesia, according to Alexa, they don’t do anything to trigger the growth, it’s just keep growing.

If you looking at this issue from their perspective, the investment to set up an office in a country is not small at all. And of course this investment has to be compared to the potential revenue / business opportunities from the country. Currently, Indonesia doesn’t look appealing in terms of potential revenue for these companies. Someday it will, but not now. Google is giving extra effort to set up their presence in Indonesia, which is good, although they are already the market leader and making good money from ad resellers.

In short, these companies CAN open their office in Indonesia if they want to, but they really don’t have to.

Rama Mamuaya

Founder, CEO, Writer, Admin, Designer, Coder, Webmaster, Sales, Business Development and Head Janitor of DailySocial.net.

Contact me : [email protected]

5 Comments

  1. Wow, a lot of people must be glad you shed light on their “ridiculous and pathetic” questions

  2. You can argue that the demand from users here lack depth and in the knowledge economy it’s not worthwhile to go the extra effort for users already happy with what they have. If these people really want Facebook and Google to open a local office, I say (rather than begging) start collaborating and develop competing products or support people in the community who already are. This will at least force the giants to put up a fight if they want a share in the local market.

  3. This is very interesting topic, and what you say is true. Without being in Indonesia, Google and Facebook has become large in Indonesia. So for what they spend their money to make a branch office in Indonesia?

  4. They like money vampire. Take all the money and run. Its common thing that happened in Indonesia where they just invest small amount of money for Indonesian market and takes monster revenue to make their company bigger

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