12 Facts in 12 Years of BRIGHT Indonesia
In June 2020, BRIGHT Indonesia entered its 12th year. There have been many twists and turns of the journey that took place over a decade to build a true Indonesian management consulting firm. To celebrate it, we want to get closer and share our roller-coaster game with readers, clients and partners out there.
Here are 12 facts in 12 years of BRIGHT Indonesia, enjoy!
1. Who is BRIGHT Indonesia?
BRIGHT Indonesia is an international trade and investment development specialist consulting firm. Since its founding in 2008, BRIGHT Indonesia has evolved as one of the leading international trade and investment consulting firms in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.
As independent market access facilitators, we are focusing on maximizing the benefit of our client’s companies presence in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Headquartered in Jakarta, we have a strong high-quality network and expertise to cover Indonesia’s recent 3,74 trillion markets (PPP based) with 273 million population and ASEAN’s 9,75 trillion USD market (PPP based) with 656 million population.
2. Who is the founder?
Our co-founder, Primadi Wahyuwidagdo, came from a young age and grew up with an entrepreneurial spirit. His passion for business and entrepreneurship comes from his father who owns an engineering consulting company.
He is a business expert with 20 years of work experience. He worked with leading Indonesia marketing consultant, anglo hong kong global banking corporation, the largest British trading house in Asia pacific and managed an ICT hardware retail store franchise in Indonesia before crossing over to the management consultant side with global clients while developing a coffee exporter business from Indonesia to Europe.
Having lived in Sweden, Finland and Spain with extensive travel to many countries globally also broaden his perspective, provide adequate skill and knowledge as well as his cultural understanding of how global business works.
3. What was the initial idea of creating BRIGHT Indonesia? Why becoming a market access development specialist consulting firm?
When BRIGHT Indonesia was first established, it was more on becoming a business incubation for Indonesian youth to develop their business. However, as time went by, BRIGHT Indonesia was approached and engaged with global companies. Primadi and his partners used BRIGHT Indonesia as an umbrella for a coffee export startup business in 2009 when he studied in Sweden. At that time, he was knocking on the door of European coffee distributors, factories and restaurants on high-quality Indonesian coffee products from across the archipelago.
Several years later, BRIGHT Indonesia won a research project on the tourism sector in Finland and Spain in 2014–2015. During the time in Europe, BRIGHT Indonesia was asked by leading Finland university to represent them in Indonesia.
After that, Primadi saw the gap between the international companies’ expectations and its reality check in Indonesia. In 2017, BRIGHT Indonesia started to become Indonesia’s Strategic Partner of ACCIO — Catalonia Trade and Investment and from this moment on BRIGHT Indonesia also had relations with other national, local economic development boards and trade and investment agencies around the globe. Some of the most reputable past and current partners are coming from Finland, Spain, France, the USA, Canada, Australia, Germany and Switzerland.
4. What are the values that BRIGHT Indonesia brings?
With the mission to provide high-quality solutions and become a true global connector, BRIGHT Indonesia evolves as one of the leading global trade and investment consulting firms in the country. BRIGHT Indonesia envisions a future where our solution can transform lives and develop a true wealth creation for our stakeholders.
BRIGHT Indonesia brings expertise to solve clients’ problems on international trade and investment activities in Indonesia and beyond. In the long term, BRIGHT Indonesia would like to see a flourishing business, economy and wealth in the company it touched.
BRIGHT Indonesia also believes that interconnection and interdependence between nations through trade or investment can decrease the potential of world war, as we are still looking to connect all the dots to fulfill its needs.
5. What characteristics does BRIGHT Indonesia look for in employees in order to represent those values?
Team players that must always be ready for a leadership role, demonstrating integrity in life, living diversity and open-minded, acting sustainably for a constant period of time and striving for excellence when they are given tasks.
6. Why Indonesia and Southeast Asia? What is in it for BRIGHT Indonesia?
Because Indonesia is a country that has high economic potential; potential that is starting to be noticed in the international arena. Indonesia is the world’s 4th largest economy which provides a potential for business to grow. What is happening in Indonesia today is similar to the situation in China 10 years ago during the late 2000s. And today, Indonesia is also the world’s 10th largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity and a member of the G-20.
As for Southeast Asia, with a population of more than 640 million and a nominal GDP of $2.31 trillion, is fast becoming a major economic force in Asia and a driver of global growth. As the economies of neighboring China and India decelerate, and as the U.S. shifts its focus to the East, the region is increasingly becoming a destination for investment. In support, the ASEAN Economic Community has a goal of integrating the regional economies to make the countries more competitive with the rest of the world.
7. What are the most challenging obstacles in building BRIGHT Indonesia?
The most challenging part of our business is finding new clients while building our reputations, we are the wholly-owned Indonesian international trade and investment specialist consulting companies. Almost all of our major competitors are coming from their own countries, i.e. French people to serve French companies or Spanish for Spanish companies.
This is something we are proud of our achievement but in reality, it hinders us too since the reputation of Indonesia is not always good internationally. Corruption is still rampant in Indonesia, the average productivity of Indonesian workers is not as good as Vietnam or Chinese workers and Indonesian known to have a rubber watch in addition to the fluid last minute change.
While on the other side, Indonesian’s treasure is its people since Indonesian are well known as the most friendly and generous people on the planet. Furthermore Indonesia’s creative economy has been flourishing due to the Indonesian innovation and creativity.
8. How does BRIGHT Indonesia work?
Having a job as a management consultant is like having an army knife as a solution to various corporate problems. BRIGHT Indonesia will usually work on one or more projects at a time so that we can give our clients full focus and attention.
We split our workflow into stages:
BRIGHT Indonesia also focuses on providing an end to end process of trade and investment market access activities into Indonesia for our clients and partners.
9. What are BRIGHT Indonesia’s interesting projects with previous clients? What are the impacts?
We are proud to work on the national or provincial economic diplomacy area of our international government clients and partners. While in the private sectors, we currently serve pan European biosecurity companies market access to Indonesia and its 50 million Euro investment along with Indonesia’s pharmaceutical company with 120 million USD market expansion into North America.
We think the most memorable impact is to create more jobs for fellow Indonesian while providing Indonesian people a better high-quality product than its currently ready in the market, while on the other side we believe that we can work on expanding Southeast Asia’s company presence at one of the world most developed markets.
10. What are BRIGHT Indonesia’s most proud of regarding the company?
The biggest strength of our company is its people, the agility and determination to solve the complex challenge of doing business in Indonesia.
We are honored because we can give an impact on society by developing global business connections along with providing jobs to the region where we are working. Jobs can create life, some people will be happy when they can have jobs and prosperity. They can feed and develop their children, they can share happiness with friends and families while in the long run.
11. What BRIGHT Indonesia hopes to accomplish within the next year?
We would like to grow our customer base by representing more national or provincial trade and investment agencies in Indonesia and/or Southeast Asia. We would like to grow and develop more people under our umbrella to develop global citizens with great management consulting competencies. That was the reason we wanted to focus more on the digital and communication side.
12. What BRIGHT Indonesia think are the biggest challenges our industry will face in the next 5 years?
The biggest challenge is the transformation of the business with the rise of digitalization effects in the management consulting industry. Artificial Intelligence development might decrease the needs of the business to the people’s knowledge and skills among many others.
The political and security situations in the Asia Pacific regions might pose a threat too since the rivalry between major countries might develop into conflicts or even world war 3. Everything that was built in years and decades can be sinking in just one moment as we can see in the Middle East and Africa. We think the freedom of thinking, respect of tolerances and the involvement of the people in the democratic governances can play a role to mitigate the political and security risk.
As said, “As clients learn how to express new needs, good consultants learn how to address them.” BRIGHT Indonesia believes that the success of management consulting depends solely on analytic expertise and on an ability to present convincing reports, while the case from global clients is a stepping stone in honing and challenging the BRIGHT Indonesia team to be even more critical.
And for the years ahead, the values we carry will form the base in thinking to provide high-quality solutions for our clients, and surely, become a true global connector.
