Lippo Group representative John Riady was notably missing from the invite-only Macquarie Indonesia Telecoms and Ecommerce Conference in Jakarta yesterday, attended by the who’s who of Indonesia’s tech players including the nation’s largest telcos and the government’s tech minister Rudiantara. Riady, who is heading up Indonesia’s latest ecommerce venture MatahariMall, would rather focus on getting the online store off the ground.
Last month, Indonesia’s Lippo Group put US$500 million into MatahariMall in hopes of building the business-to-consumer site that would eventually become the “Alibaba of Indonesia” – in the words of the firm’s public relations.
As the grandson of Lippo Group’s founder Mochtar Riady, John Riady is a high-profile figure in Indonesia’s business and media scene. He was a teenager during the fall of Suharto, the former dictator who presided over three decades of a corrupt and brutal regime. With an early interest in politics, Riady attended Georgetown University in the US, where he studied political philosophy and economics before returning to Indonesia to build the local English language media outlets GlobeAsia magazine and The Jakarta Globe newspaper. He later purchased Investor Daily Indonesia. But according to Riady, there is “no money to be made in media” these days, which is why he’s now shifting his focus toward ecommerce.