The Jakarta Post reports that internet access in Indonesia lags behind other countries with just 6.6% of the population online – but that’s a healthy 16 million audience. Neighbouring Malaysia is reported at 33% of the population and 8 million users and Thailand has 6.5 million users representing 12% of the population.
Indonesia Corp’s country manager, Bude Wahyu Jati, announced the figures in Semarang adding that language problems mean that most access is in the big cities. It’s a fair assumption that the low percentages of access and the fact that most users are city dwellers, means that the users accessing the internet are the wealthier sections of the populations.
But on figures alone, by my reckoning, this puts Indonesia ahead of Spain, US Hispanics, the Netherlands, Belgium or many other countries. A market size not to be sniffed at.
2 responses
Yes I agree! The main point – as we saw from Georgi – is that cities win in lower penetration country – which also means there a more attractive e-commerce audience having more access to money, banking systems and so on.
Those low penetration rates reveal a lot of room for growth even in the larger cities. That’s 30 million internet users in those 3 countries alone and there are many more countries in Southeast Asia. It will be interesting to see how those numbers change over the next few years.