VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati stated that the potential for Indonesia's digital economy is extraordinary, which can be seen through projections from research results by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company.

"The report that illustrates the potential of Indonesia's digital economy is extraordinary," said Sri Mulyani at the opening of the 2020 Indonesia Fintech Summit in Jakarta, Wednesday.

Sri Mulyani said the research estimated that the potential for the internet from 2019 to 2025 would more than triple, from $40 billion to $133 billion.

Then the value of e-commerce transactions will more than quadruple, from $20 billion to $82 billion, and online travel services from $10 billion to $25 billion.

Online media is estimated to increase from $3.5 billion to $9 billion and online vehicle services from $5.7 billion to $18 billion.

"This means that Indonesia has tremendous potential in the digital economy sector, but this potential cannot become something real and concrete if it does not develop various necessary and submission conditions," said Sri Mulyani.

She explained that the submission condition in this case is an adequate infrastructure so that all Indonesian people from Sabang to Merauke can access the internet.

"There are no terms outermost, marginalized, or left behind. They need internet access, so we need to build infrastructure," said Sri Mulyani.

Moreover, she said that according to research from the World Economic Forum (WEF), Indonesia will succeed in achieving this goal if it can meet four problems.

The four problems are infrastructure including ICT, increasing the capacity of Human Resources in order to be able to adopt ICT, as well as institutions and regulations.

"If we look at the infrastructure, the government, because this year's situation has COVID-19, is a bit slowdown," said Sri Mulyani.

Even though infrastructure development has decreased this year, Sri Mulyani ensures that the government will push it back next year by allocating a budget of Rp 413 trillion in the 2021 State Budget.

"What's that for? To build a base transmission station in more than 5 thousand villages, we know that there are 12 thousand villages that are not connected to ICT," said Sri Mulyani. (Antaranews)