SME Webinar Indonesia: Strengthening Indonesian SMEs’ Performance with Digitalization

The US-ASEAN Business Council (the Council) is pleased to introduce an initiative, SME Webinar Series in Response to COVID-19. It is a part of the ASEAN SME Academy (the Academy) activity and aims to help ASEAN SMEs strive amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. It will each focusing on the overarching theme – “Optimizing the Digital Creative Economy for SMEs: Strengthening Indonesian SMEs’ Performance with Digitalization”. This workshop will be conducted on December 9, 2021.

As SMEs represent around 97% of firms and 60% to 80% of total employment across ASEAN countries, it clearly has vital role for ASEAN’s economy back bone. In Indonesia, there are around 62 million SMEs in the country however 98.75% of these are micro-enterprises which are still in its early-stage growth and lack of a strategic plan. This has led the Indonesian SMEs to yield a relatively low growth level or are even prone to business failure. The COVID-19 pandemic has added shocks to ASEAN SMEs with supply shortage, constraint in distribution, lack of funding, to low market expansion. Despite the challenges and blocks, several opportunities arise for these SMEs. For example, the rise of digital technology offers various digital tools for SMEs to enhance their productivity and boost their growth. Moreover, there is an increased number of new middle class in ASEAN, which offers a potential massive market for SMEs.
With increasing potential from creative economy sphere, this opens a new opportunity to leverage ASEAN SMEs’ competitiveness. It is vital to help these SMEs to achieve a better understanding about the rising business trends and consumers’ behavior as well as maximally utilizing all the opportunities with effective strategies and tools. In conjunction with the 2021 International Year on Creative Economy for Sustainable Development as well as the ASEAN Comprehensive Recovery Framework (ACRF), it is timely for ASEAN to manifest its commitment to mainstreaming the creative economy and one of it is through the upcoming ASEAN Creative Economy Business Forum (ACEBF).

The Council is convinced that it is both timely and imperative to enhance Indonesian SMEs’ digital skills making SMEs in Southeast Asia more competitive in its domestic/national markets and at the same time help SMEs to be better integrated into the regional and global value chains. Therefore, the Council plans to provide support for SMEs through this technical workshops and capacity building.