By : Jacky Mussry
(Chief Knowledge Officer, MarkPlus, Inc.)


Marketeers February 2010

Telkom Indonesia is serious in improving its value creation to its customers as well as its shareholders. The rule is quite simple, and everybody understands that if a company is able to increase its value, sooner or later, the company's increase in value will be represented in its stock price as well as the company's dividends.One of the most common step taken is to find a new business, which is that Telkom Indonesia has done. This is also inline with its business transformation process that has taken place for the past few years.

Relating to the above topic, one of the efforts that have taken place recently is the existence of Telkom Indonesia's subsidiary, known as Mojopia that provides three service, e-commerce, content and communication. E-commerce is expected to stimulate online business transactions that are still haunted with the ‘low-trust' phenomenon. Content will be focused on entertainment, while communication will be focused on online communication services. Mojopia will also, in the near future, be managing other portals with different portal names. With Telkom Indonesia's name supporting it, Mojopia is expected to be a successful, especially with its long preparation. Having done a number of comparative studies in many countries, Mojopia is expected to provide a significant contribution to Telkom Indonesia in the next couple of years.

What's interesting is Telkom Indonesia's courage in making a breakthrough that is quite unusual among many state-owned corporations by appointing Mojopia's officials that are not from Telkom Indonesia itself, such as Shinta Dhanuwardoyo, Chief Executive Officer of Mojopia, and Andi S. Boediman, Chief Innovation Officer of Mojopia. They are regarded as the perfect person needed to run Mojopia's business by Telkom Indonesia's chief officers. Although they are relatively young, they are people of high-caliber in the virtual world industry. According to Andi, as a subsidiary of Telkom Indonesia, Mojopia is expected to be a content updater that is able to provide various contents to business units under the Telkom Indonesia umbrella, such as Telkomsel, Speedy, etc.

The existence of value creation can be seen in various company performance indicators, whether it's financial or non-financial indicators. Therefore, according to Andi, Mojopia does not only aim to be a broker, because if it becomes a pure mediator, whose task is only to “match up” various parties that are in need of each other, its business sustainability will be low. Moreover, what they want to create is a system that is able to build trust, which will become an important key in value creation. Gaining the user trust such as these has been successfully done by e-Bay, who has already shaped a reputation that is hard to compete with and is able to guarantee e-Bay's sustainability. In e-commerce, this should be built first, but at the same time, plasa.com should also be able to provide an exciting experience for its users. Amazon.com, for example, has a system that is able to make the website seem to ‘understand' what the users are searching for.

A full version of the interview in Bahasa Indonesia can be read in our Nov-Dec 2009 edition of Marketeers.