Jakarta. Indonesian companies have booked new deals worth over $8 billion (Rp 125.82 trillion) in a forum that connected them with organizations from the largely untapped markets of South and Central Asian regions.

Jakarta hosted the Indonesia-South and Central Asia Business Forum (Inasca) on Monday. As the name suggests, the event saw hundreds of business delegations gathering at Indonesia’s most modern city to discuss partnership opportunities. The government claimed that this marked the first time a forum had specifically linked Indonesian entrepreneurs with businesses from South and Central Asia. Despite being the maiden edition, the 2024 Inasca already posted trade and investment deals worth billions of American dollars.

“The Inasca forum secured business deals worth around $8.3 billion so far,” Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Pahala Mansury told a press briefing on the margins of the forum. 

State-run pharma giant Kimia Farma signed a marketing agreement with Sri Lankan pharmaceutical importer Yaden International at the Inasca forum. The deal would enable Kimia Farma's finished pharmaceutical products to be marketed in Sri Lanka. East Java’s herbicide manufacturer Pandawa Agri Indonesia also inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Oneemto (Pvt) Ltd to have their chemical products distributed in Sri Lanka. Coconut processing company Natural Indococonut Organik also agreed to partner with Sri Lanka’s Industrial Stainless Steel Fabrication Pvt Ltd. 

These three deals showed that local businesses had warmed up to Sri Lanka -- one of the South Asian markets that companies had not explored much in the past-- something that Shinta Kamdani, the chairwoman of the Indonesian Employers Association (Apindo) had pointed out.

“There are huge disparities in our economic relations with countries in Central and South Asia. Our economic activities [with the two regions] are primarily driven by our relations with long-standing partners like India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Indonesia does not have that much trade or business presence in countries like Sri Lanka,” Shinta told the same Inasca forum.

“It will be a missed opportunity if Indonesia does not expand its business outreach to these less familiar [markets],” Shinta said.

Pahala revealed that Indonesia’s combined trade volume with Central and South Asia hit $35.4 billion in 2023, up by 54 percent from the $23 billion recorded in the pre-Covid 2019. Trade Ministry data confirmed Shinta’s statements on the volume gap. Indonesia-India trade totaled nearly $27 billion last year. This marked a huge contrast to the $369.7 million total trade between Indonesia and Sri Lanka, government data showed.