Appetite grows for Indonesia’s herbal remedies

June 1, 2014 5:45 am

Appetite grows for Indonesia’s herbal remedies

By Ben Bland in Jakarta

Whether suffering from headaches, a cold or flatulence, Indonesians have long sought relief in a range of cure-all herbal potions known as jamu.

By producing its signature Tolak Angin (“expel the wind”) herbal medicine in small, cheap-to-distribute sachets, Irwan Hidayat’s family took a cottage industry dominated by itinerant hawkers and petty stallholders and transformed it into a billion-dollar business.

“When I was small, I could not imagine that we could build a company such as this,” says the 67-year-old chief executive of Sido Muncul, the family’s herbal medicine company, which has seen its shares rise by 40 per cent since it listed in Jakarta in December, giving it a market capitalisation of more than $1bn.

Every month last year, Indonesians consumed 58m sachets of Tolak Angin, which is designed to counter the common ailment known as masuk angin – meaning “the entry of wind” – and manifests itself in a weakened immune system.

In spite of its ubiquity, demand for Tolak Angin and other herbal medicines is rising as growing incomes in southeast Asia’s biggest economy push people to spend more on traditional remedies as well as conventional medicine.

“Having existed for generations in Indonesia, local traditional herbal medicines have been perceived to have natural healing effectiveness,” says Yulia Fransisca, an analyst at Euromonitor International, a market research company. “As consumers in the country are getting more health conscious, the demand for these products also continues to grow.”

The number of Indonesians with discretionary cash to spend will jump from 45m today to 145m by 2030, according to Nielsen, another market research house. Many of these new consumers will be towards the bottom end of the income spectrum – the core market for Tolak Angin sachets priced at Rp2,700 ($0.23).

Sido Muncul’s weird and wonderful herbal medicines

Tolak Angin

Sido Muncul’s best-known product, and one of Indonesia’s most popular consumer brands, is made from a secret recipe that includes fennel, ginger and cumin and sold in individual-use liquid and powder sachets, writes Ben Bland .

It is already sold in India, Malaysia and a few other countries, and the company is looking for distributors to help it boost exports.

Kuku Bima Ener-G

To keep production and distribution costs low, the company’s energy drink is sold in sachets of powder, which users must add to water, rather than ready-to-drink bottles.

Containing ginseng, caffeine and a range of vitamins, it is promoted on TV, billboards and buses across Indonesia by Ade Rai, an Indonesian bodybuilder.

Kuku Bima TL

The company also produces a traditional aphrodisiac pill made from ginseng and seahorse called Kuku Bima TL, which it claims “increases sexual drive and virility” and “improves sperm quality and mobility”.

Although herbal remedies are popular across Asia, Sido Muncul is one of only a handful of listed companies serving this market, alongside China’s Beijing Tongrentang, Singapore’s Eu Yan Sang and Malaysia’s Hai-O and Power Root.

Indonesia is one of the fastest-growing traditional medicine markets in the region, with Euromonitor predicting that sales – which reached $663m in 2013 – will grow by 9 per cent annually in the next five years.

To tap this demand and to kick-start its small export business, Sido Muncul, which means “a dream come true” in Javanese, is using the Rp870bn gross proceeds of its initial public offering to more than double the capacity at its factory in Semarang, central Java, to 200m sachets a month – about one for every adult in this nation of 250m people.

In spite of its traditional roots, the tonic is produced in a modern 4,000-employee factory, where 200 technicians work shifts covering 24 hours a day on quality control using the latest laboratory equipment.

The company, which is 81 per cent-owned by the family, is the leader in its field, claiming 75 per cent market share in sales of remedies for “entry of wind” and with 15 per cent market share across all herbal medicine, according to Euromonitor.

But it is facing growing competition as rivals such as Kalbe Farma, Indonesia’s biggest pharmaceutical company, muscle into this lucrative market.

Kalbe, which is also listed in Jakarta, and family-owned Deltomed Laboratories, are heavily marketing their own similar remedies in Tolak Angin-style yellow packaging, with Kalbe using a lookalike of the presidential election frontrunner Joko Widodo to front its television commercials.

Kalbe is also giving Sido Muncul a run for its money in the energy drink sector, where its Extra Joss brand is going head-to-head with the latter’s Kuku Bima Ener-G.

Sido Muncul’s total sales fell slightly year on year to Rp2.37tn in 2013, as it lost out to Extra Joss after Kalbe signed a sponsorship agreement with Manchester City, the English Premier League football champions, and embarked on a marketing and discounting drive in the nation of many football fans.

But net profits increased by 5 per cent to Rp407bn because of growing sales of higher-margin Tolak Angin.

Like other companies targeting emerging market consumers at the bottom of the income pyramid, such as Unilever and Procter & Gamble, Sido Muncul has a large potential market but it is susceptible to price wars.

“This is a huge market and it is competitive on price,” says Michael Setjoadi, an analyst at Bahana Securities, a Jakarta-based stock broker. “But Tolak Angin still benefits from good brand equity and its distribution channels are strong.”

While the family jealously guards the recipe for Tolak Angin, Mr Hidayat concedes that the secret to its success in a nation of many islands and woeful infrastructure lies as much in the supply chain as in the combination of herbs and spices.

“We work with more than 160,000 wholesalers to get into millions of points of sale, most of them in traditional stores rather than supermarkets,” he says. “But you have to start with a good product in the first place.”