NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Friday, July 11, 2014

US-based information and communication technology (ICT) company Hewlett-Packard (HP) is targeting customers from small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the public sector in Indonesia, considering these market segments to be the nation’s most robust.

HP senior vice president and general manager of Enterprise Group for Asia-Pacific and Japan, Jim Merritt, said his company views developing markets like Indonesia as an engine of growth.

“So, we are focusing mainly on SMEs and the public sector,” he said recently in Mumbai, during HP’s Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) 2014 media summit.

Merritt said the SMEs in Indonesia were the biggest private sector market for HP products aside from commercial retail accounts and global companies. “Just by size alone, the SMEs are growing rapidly,” he said.

According to data from Indonesia’s Cooperatives and Small and Medium Enterprises Ministry, the SMEs account for nearly 90 percent of all businesses in the country. They also provide 97.2 percent of domestic employment and contribute 57.9 percent to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

He said global markets were very competitive because many of HP’s competitors, companies like IBM and Dell, also targeted them. “Instead of having 100 global enterprise customers, it is better to have 25,000 customers from SMEs,” he said.