Making Indonesia 4.0

By: Adellyn Garcia

January 28, 2022

As of 2018, the Indonesian Ministry of Industry has designed an integrated road map with the motive of bringing the country towards the 4th generation of industry revolution. Recently, this topic has garnered the media’s attention after Sung Kim, the United States’ ambassador to Indonesia, commented on how he fully supports President Joko Widodo’s plan to bring Indonesia into a new era of digitalization during a virtual conference on the 22nd of January 2022. 

“Making Indonesia 4.0” is an idea developed by the Indonesian Ministry of Industry with the idea of bringing the industrial sector of Indonesia to a whole new level by fully utilising the ever advancing information and communication technology. In doing so, hopes for higher efficiency, accuracy and product quality in the industrial sector have arisen. 

“Indonesia has entered the new era of Industry 4.0 in 2011 which was marked by the increasing connectivity, interaction, as well as more convergent people, machines and other resources as the result of  the advancement in information and communication technology,” stated Airlangga Hartanto, Indonesia’s Minister of Industry. 

With the implementation of this idea, Airlangga hopes Indonesia would become one of the top 10 countries with the largest economies by 2030. Aside from this, he hopes that it would also return the industry net export rate to 10%, double the labour productivity rate over labour cost, and increase the amount of GDP allocated to R&D and technology innovation fields to 2%. 

As of now, the government has prioritised a few things that they believe would play a major role in this project. Those few being, reforming the flow of materials, redesigning the industrial zones, improving the human resource quality, empowering Micro Small and Medium Enterprises, implementing incentives for technology investment, forming an innovative ecosystem, attracting foreign investment, harmonising policy and regulations, building a national digital infrastructure, and accommodating the standard of sustainability. 

Having first mentioned this project 4 years ago in 2018, we can hope for a huge change in the country’s industrial sector sometime in the near future.