The Today's Headlines section of Indonesia Investments is a regularly updated section which contains the latest information with regard to topics that are currently causing headlines in Indonesia's media. Most of our headlines cover political, economic and social matters. As a consequence of their recent nature, these topics may not have crystallized fully yet and can, therefore, lack a profound analysis. For publications with a more in-depth understanding of subjects, we refer you to our News, Financial or Business columns.
The main question today is how markets in Asia will respond to the terror attacks in London and the weaker-than expected US jobs report, both occurring at the end of last week when Asian markets had already closed. Interestingly enough, the bleak US employment data did little to dent investor sentiment in the USA at the end of last week. The three key indexes on Wall Street all rose on Friday, moving closely to record highs.
On 4 June 2017, Indonesia Investments released the latest edition of its newsletter. This free newsletter, which is sent to our subscribers once per week, contains the most important news stories from Indonesia that have been reported on our website over the last seven days. Most of the topics involve economy-related matters such as crude palm oil, the retail sector, Samurai bonds, inflation, manufacturing activity, cement, the banking sector, and more.
Sales of buses (those used for commercial purposes) are growing sharply in Indonesia so far in 2017 and this gives a positive signal to factories. In fact, growth of bus sales, by far, outpaces growth of the whole automotive sector in the first couple of months of 2017. While total sales in Indonesia's automotive sector grew by a modest 5.72 percent year-on-year (y/y) to 282,596 units in the January-March 2017 period, sales of buses grew 30.43 percent (y/y) to 840 in the first four months of 2017.
Use of digital cash in transactions of ride-hailing and logistics services providers Grab and Go-Jek is becoming increasingly important. The management of Grab stated that cashless transactions (using smartphones tied to mobile payment systems) are now contributing more than half of the total value of transactions of Grab. Since the introduction of GrabPay, the value of cashless transactions recorded double-digit growth every month.
