Borderless recently caught up with Indonesian Tech Minister Rudiantara at his office in Jakarta.
The interview comes at a time when the country –and much of Southeast Asia – is seeing a tech and e-commerce boom, as millions of people get online in an information revolution not seen in thousands of years.
Rudiantara is spearheading the move to digitize Indonesia and eventually get the Internet to all the archipelago’s tens of thousands of islands.
In a long-ranging interview, the tech minister predicts that the value of the country’s e-commerce sector will surge in 2020 to $130 billion dollars from last year’s 18 billion.
When Borderless asked what he bases the big jump on, he said the country needs to address a number of issues to get there, such as funding, infrastructure, cyber security, and especially the opening of the market to players outside Indonesia.
But the jury remains out on whether e-commerce transactions can make such an explosive jump in the next few years, and critics say there are a number of speed bumps in the road, from figuring out how to increase e-payments (in a country where most people don’t have credit cards) and online data protection.
Interview recorded March 24, 2016.
Click on the headline to watch full interview clip
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