Jakarta governor-elect Anis Baswedan (R) and his deputy governor-elect Sandiaga Uno (L) hold hands during a press conference in Jakarta on April 19, 2017.
Adek Berry | AFP | Getty Images
When Sandiaga Uno was appointed Indonesia’s minister of tourism and inventive economy, it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
It was December 2020, and the Covid-19 pandemic had prevented people from visiting the country for months.
“I used to be the minister of tourism and with zero tourists,” Uno told CNBC’s Christine Tan, speaking at an event in Singapore last month.
Indonesia had around 16 million overseas arrivals in 2019, based on government data, and by 2021, the figure dropped to 1.6 million. In 2022, numbers increased to five.5 million arrivals.
“I said [we] might as well, let’s not have a ministry. We now have zero tourists, but then I spotted, hundreds of thousands of individuals have lost their jobs … we were really in a really, very difficult time,” Uno said.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo told Uno: “‘You understand what to do,'” Uno recalled. “I had zero clue, what I used to be going to do, but I used to be considering [about] what could really matter to the people.”
It wasn’t the primary time Uno — a multi-millionaire entrepreneur and businessman before he became a politician — had a troublesome profession transient. Finding himself unemployed after the financial crisis in Asia in 1997, he arrange investment company Saratoga Capital, initially to assist failing firms. Being offered the tourism role in the course of the Covid crisis might have been destiny, Uno said, given this experience.
“Perhaps that is just my fate, because after I began my business, I deal with company that needs restructuring, company that needs fundraising, principally the corporate that should be revived,” he said.
“[The tourism] sector was home of 45 million Indonesians, and shut to five million Indonesians lost their job,” he said.
Entrepreneurial mindset
Uno told the ministry: “It’s essential have a startup mentality, since you’re ranging from zero.” The team learned some hard lessons when it got here to constructing the industry back up, he added.
“When the [visitor] … numbers dropped to zero … we forgot about [the] domestic economy. We were targeting foreign tourist arrivals. But we have now 280 million people — and this 12 months, we’re targeting 1.4 billion movement[s] of domestic tourists,” Uno told CNBC.
Alongside this tourism push, Uno’s remit is to assist the country’s creative industries akin to food, fashion and craft industries grow via digital means. Twenty-three million Indonesians work within the sector, and the digital economy will probably be price $140 billion this 12 months, up from $70 billion in 2019, Uno said.
Digital connectivity just isn’t distributed evenly, given there are greater than 17,000 islands within the region. “We want to bring as much as $50 billion in the following years to … deal with our digital infrastructures,” Uno said. “You’ve beautiful destinations, you might have amazing opportunities for small medium enterprises, but [if] you can’t have the connectivity, then it is going to be put to waste,” he added.
Uno began his profession in banking in 1990, taking an MBA at George Washington University in 1992 before joining oil and gas company NTI Resources in 1995. In 2013, he and business partner Edwin Soeryadjaya took the investment arm of Saratoga Capital public after operating it for around 15 years, raising $150 million. Later that 12 months, Forbes named Uno one in all Indonesia’s richest people, with a net price of $460 million.
“The listing was successful, and I’m very grateful. And I used to be asked by among the government leaders to take into consideration joining political parties [but I] continued to refuse,” Uno said.
But in 2015, he was approached by Prabowo Subianto, who’s currently Indonesia’s defense minister. “He said that: ‘You’ve been successful, and you might have been wealthy and prosperous due to Indonesia. It is time so that you can contribute back to your country.’ And that is what I did,” Uno said.
A multi-million dollar campaign
He joined the right-wing Gerakan Indonesia Raya party (referred to as Gerindra), and in 2017 became deputy governor of Jakarta. He resigned in 2018 to turn out to be Subianto’s running mate for the presidential election – a campaign that cost the party near $100 million over the course of a 12 months, Uno said, a figure he partly funded himself.
“Campaigning in, region[al] Indonesia may be very, very difficult and expensive, because [of the] logistics from one place to a different,” Uno said. The country is the world’s largest archipelagic state.
Subianto lost the election to Widodo, and Uno held no office until Widodo appointed him to his current role in 2020.
In April, Uno announced his intention to affix Indonesia’s United Development Party (referred to as PPP), which he became a part of in June. “I’m able to fight hard for the people,” he said, citing improving the economy and increasing people’s income as a spotlight for the party within the run-up to the presidential election in 2024.
Does Uno hope to turn out to be president someday? “You must ask that to the Indonesian people,” he said.