Sinar Budi Intraco was founded in 1991, but our background in garments dates back beyond this, beginning with my father’s development of new shirt brands in the late 60’s. Before this, he and my grandfather were involved in the manufacture of uniforms for the army. The Alisan brand was created in 1975, and was managed by our company’s predecessor, Sinar Budi Penjahit. This private company later evolved into our current operations after a substantial expansion that saw us go from hiring approximately 100 workers to hiring almost 1000 by the early 80’s. This period of our history was marked by our move into exports, focused on international markets such as Japan, England, France and Taiwan from 1991 to 1994.  

In supplying export markets we mainly took upon a wide range of small orders, but had to contend with competition from manufacturers in China. Though we eventually moved away from overseas opportunities in favour of prioritising the local market, these orders proved to be a valuable learning experience for us to better understand international standard manufacturing.

Through Alisan we offer a wide range of shirts that includes office shirts and uniforms in 49 solid colours, as well as batik garments and Muslim wear. Over the last two years we have begun exploring more fashion-driven and lifestyle-inspired products to appeal to a wider consumer base. It is our strategy going forward to build upon our foundation of loyal, older generation customers by also catering to Indonesia’s growing youth segment.

Manufacturing men’s shirts continues to be our main strength and area of focus; we have a track record going back forty years for this type of garment. At the same time we have also started producing a small line of ladies blouses for office wear. We are seeing a trend among retailers of office wear towards offering a broader collection of clothing for women as well as children. To best showcase our increasingly diverse selection of products we have looked into opening our own stores to fulfil our distribution and retail needs. Moreover, we have also acquired 2 ha of land in Cianjur to expand our production facilities, and have already initiated an employee training phase in preparation for when we begin manufacturing there in 2015.

For the Indonesian market we have a positive outlook, as we have brand equity here and target our products for the growing middle class. With that said, rising labour costs will be a challenge going forward and will make it more difficult for us to compete.

From a more global perspective, we have seen many export oriented textiles companies shut down as a result of intense competition from China. The emergence of Vietnam and Myanmar as textile manufacturing bases also able to offer cheap labour stands to make the industry serving international orders even more saturated. We must also take into consideration the likelihood that these countries will increasingly seek to take advantage of Indonesia’s sizeable market by exporting their products into the country.   

Given this context we are going to continue prioritising local opportunities by furthering our presence in areas such as Eastern Indonesia.  However we also remain open to the possibility of expanding our brand within the ASEAN if we are able to work with a partner that has established distribution channels in the target market.

We are open to partnership opportunities but would need to evaluate proposals on a case by case basis. As a family business we need to take into consideration what we can offer prospective partners as opposed to simply focusing on what they can offer us, because it is important that any potential agreement to cooperate is mutually beneficial.

It is our view that to truly take advantage of partnerships with foreign entities, we need to first further develop internally and take steps to advance beyond operating as a family owned business. Once better positioned for cooperation, our company would benefit the most from partners able to provide access to new markets.    

Our company in the long term needs to make itself more open to opportunities on the international stage as well as better understand what the world can offer us and what we can offer to the world. Having established our market leading position by primarily operating within Indonesia, it is about time for us to look further afield to reach the next stage in our ongoing development.  

It is also our goal to expand our reach by entering the retail market, as this area of business has seen numerous success stories for local and international companies offering garments similar to ours.

Indonesia is an attractive place to do business, and we welcome international companies looking to cooperate with local players. With the new government soon to take over, we expect that challenges such as bureaucracy will be addressed as part of a new way of doing business here.