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Indonesia’s stock exchange is embarking on an ambitious programme of growth that aims to treble the market capitalization of the exchange by 2012, according to its president. Speaking to Euromoney in his office at the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX), company president director Ito Warsito says that he and his colleagues set the target in early 2009. "At the end of 2008," he says, "the market capitalization of Indonesia’s stock market was just over Rph1,000 trillion – just under $100 billion. As part of our campaign for election to the board in early 2009 we set a target of $300 billion by 2012 and so the focus is on increasing the number of IPOs to keep new stocks coming on to the exchange and promote liquidity."
The end of 2008 was something of a nadir for Indonesia’s exchange, as it was for most of its global peers, with the composite JKSE index bottoming out on November 17 at 1146, having been above 2,800 in January.
This year the index had recovered steadily, threatening to break the psychologically important 3,000 mark on April 30 before a pair of events, one external, one local, caused a sharp market correction that exposed something of the nature of the challenge facing Warsito and his team.