AEC (ASEAN ECONOMIC COMMUNITY)

Hello there folks! We finally meet again. Today we're gonna discuss about AEC or in bahasa many people call it Masyarakat Ekonomi ASEAN. What is this? So basically this agreement was made in order to enhance the competitiveness of ASEAN countries to compete along China and India to gain more foreign investment, and not only limited in trading for goods and services, AEC also took part in skilled professional labor, and this agreement requires the countries to eliminate a few rules about foreign labor acceptance, so the point is those foreigners will have easier access to work in ASEAN countries, and easier access for goods and services to be sold between ASEAN countries. How is this agreement affecting our beloved country? It literally could be both. There are few positive impact such as Indonesia right now has 250 million of potential market, but with AEC there are expected of 625 million potential market that Indonesia could target, another thing is the reduced cost for import and export tariff which could significantly lowering the cost of Indonesia’s product to penetrate even greater market.

A few negative impacts such as harsher competition for both our labor and goods & services to compete nationally due to the foreign factors, because right now our standard of labor and product and also infrastructure is still behind other ASEAN countries.

Based on the effects mentioned above, how do we arm ourselves? There are few basic things we could do. First of all, we need to increase the quality of our manpower and standardization of our good and services produced. With better quality we believe we could compete in AEC.

Second of all is we need to pay more attention to our SME's (Small Medium Enterprise). As for the government such rules and policy that can protect our SME's such as tax settings, easier access to obtain credits, and many others. As for the SME's, we need to be focus and passionate in creating value. The most easiest technique is to do benchmarking, to make us at least on the same level with our competitors, next step would be observe, replicate, and modified or in bahasa people refer this as ATM Theory (Amati, Tiru, Modifikasi) which seems simple yet so powerful IF we could execute it on target. Because more than 90% of business in Indonesia is still counted as SME's, so the economic condition of our country mostly supported by these Small Medium Enterprise. So it's our job to be as creative as possible, to fulfill the needs of our costumer, and remember creating a business is never as instant as a cup noodle haha ;) time and energy are needed to raise it. We never meant to scare you about AEC with this article, but we wanted to remind all of us, that the competition is out there and they are ready while most of us are still denying it. WAKE UP GUYS!!! It's time for us to shine!! Another quote for today:

"If you don't drive your business, you will driven out of business" -B.C. Forbes-

Ibnu Prabowo