Indonesia Must Accelerate Targeted Digital Investment to Move into APAC's Leading Tier of Digital Nations, says GSMA

PRNewswire
Jakarta [Indonesia], December 10: The GSMA today urged a sharper, investment-led push to accelerate Indonesia's digital transformation and drive innovation, outlining findings from its recent GSMA Digital Nations 2025 and ASEAN Consumer Scam 2025 reports. Investment priorities span spectrum, rural coverage and AI - ready infrastructure, as scam pressures rise.
Speaking at the Digital Nation Summit (DNS) Jakarta, the GSMA outlined a practical programme to unlock private capital and speed deployment across 5G spectrum, fibre backhaul and AI-ready data centres, supported by policy certainty and cross-sector collaboration.
Indonesian enterprises are signalling one of the region's strongest appetites for digital transformation. A recent GSMA Intelligence survey of more than 580 companies across ASEAN shows firms in Indonesia expect to channel an average 10 per cent of their revenues into digital transformation between 2025 and 2030, above both the ASEAN (10.4 per cent) and global (9.8 per cent) averages. Two-thirds of respondents ranked AI in their top three areas of spend, while over half view 5G-enabled IoT as essential to future growth, underlining the country's ambition to harness next-generation technologies for competitiveness and security.
According to GSMA Intelligence, the next wave of 5G investment in Indonesia can unlock a further US$41 billion in gross domestic product for the nation's economy between 2024 and 2030, underscoring the transformative economic impact of digital connectivity (GSMA Intelligence, Forging a resilient digital nation: Proposals for Indonesia's future, December 2023). Mobile operators have invested almost US$29 billion in Indonesia's network infrastructure and services since 2015. With the right investment landscape, the industry--including operators and ecosystem partners--is expected to commit an additional US$16 billion between 2024 and 2030, with a strong focus on 5G rollouts.
Julian Gorman, Head of Asia Pacific at the GSMA commented: "Indonesia's scale, entrepreneurial energy and young, connected population give the country a strong opportunity to lead. The priority now is investment where it counts: affordable, predictable spectrum; resilient backhaul; and AI-ready, sustainable data centres paired with visible consumer protections. With clear policy signals and cross-sector execution, Indonesia can innovate by crowding in private capital, hardening defences against scams and accelerating inclusive growth across the archipelago."
The GSMA's Digital Nations report tracked the progress of Asia Pacific nations across five pillars namely in infrastructure, innovation, data governance, security and people, highlighting where investment can yield the greatest impact. Indonesia ranked in the middle of the 21 nations benchmarked. While it showed Indonesia's strengths around people, digital skills and cybersecurity it also highlighted areas of improvement in innovation and investment. Delays to mid-band spectrum allocation, uneven rural coverage and limited AI-ready capacity risk slowing momentum just as demand accelerates.
Consumer trust is also under strain. Indonesian insights from the ASEAN Consumer Scam Report 2025 show Indonesia tracks the broader ASEAN picture where 45% of adults report lifetime victimisation and 68% of victims lose money. In Indonesia specifically, scam contacts are even more mobile-first, with OTT messaging (50%) and voice calls (44%) both above the ASEAN average. The good news: 81% of Indonesians support operators sharing minimal, purpose-bound network signals (e.g., SIM-change and number-verification) at high-risk moments to stop fraud - paving the way for wider use of GSMA Open Gateway anti-fraud APIs.
Indonesia's three major mobile players, Telkomsel, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and XLSmart have formed an alliance to protect customers from scams and other cybersecurity risks by jointly adopting Open Gateway APIs, such as SIM Swap, Number Verification and Device Location, to secure payments and logins.
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