Hot spots: opportunities and risks in Indonesia

Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim majority state, its third biggest democracy and fourth most populous country. It is the sixth-biggest emerging market by GDP, and in the past decade has grown faster than any other $1trn-plus economy bar China and India. A source of dynamism is digital services, with over 100m people spending $80bn a year on everything from e-payment to apps for on-demand trucking. With a fifth of the global reserves of nickel, the country is a vital link in electric vehicle supply chains.

During this event, we’ll present the latest EIU analysis on

• Macro-economic forecasts
• Market demographics
• Political factors
• Opportunities and hotspots across industries

Sumana Rajarethnam is the South-east Asia director of the Economist Corporate Network based in Singapore. Sumana works closely with network members to help inform their business strategies through political, economic and operational insight and to connect them with their senior leadership peers.

Sumana is a senior policy professional with 17 years of business advisory experience, nine of those as an analyst, principal and director with the EIU from 2011-2020. He has most recently been working in the Chinese technology sector, including stints at Kuaishou Technology and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.

Before joining The Economist Group, Sumana worked as a journalist and in public relations with a focus on government and institutional clients. He served as executive director of the Asian Dialogue Society, working to develop an alternative ASEAN Charter with leading policymakers, and organised the “Building a Better Asia” series, a programme for young leaders across Asia undertaken with Peking University and the Nippon Foundation.