Paul Holba, on location in Indonesia, discusses Jakarta’s growing economy and the promising future of investing in emerging markets across Asia.
It’s Paul Holba, senior vice president and chief investment officer at Empire Life Investments Inc.. Today marks the end of a week of meetings here in Asia. It started with two days in Hong Kong where my colleague Kevin Lai and I met with the senior executive of a global financial services company that we own in a number of our funds. We had the chance to hear their formal presentations of their results of the past, but also their plans for the future.
Outside of those formal presentations, we met with them one-on-one to drill a little bit deeper into those plans and test our investment thesis for the future. As with anything in Asia, what strikes you first is scale. In the Hong Kong area, we had a tour of their office and to give you a sense, surrounding the office overlooking beautiful Victoria Harbour, approximately 92 million people reside.
Today I found myself in Jakarta, a city with a population of about 35 million people, in the country of Indonesia, with over 275 million people. All well and good, but what about the economy? What you’re seeing here, first off, with the very resource rich economy in the background that now is driving other areas. They’re striving to hit 80% of the population to what they call, “emerging middle market.” Today, about 21% of the population is there.
It is that middle market that the company that we’re invested in, is looking to work with and grow in terms of market share. The other thing to notice, too, is how important it is to leverage technology. Yesterday we had a demo of a generative AI tool that really shows you how you can take a single platform, solid access to data, and change it a little bit depending on the local situation that you find yourself in whether that be regulatory partnership or otherwise and adapt it. It’s really quite striking.
Look to see more of that today as we have a tour of the office here in Jakarta. And as always, I thank you very much for your continued support and look for more of these videos of us doing our work on the ground on your behalf.
Thank you.
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July, 2024