Startups can still play along e-commerce giants in Southeast Asia's gold rush

[Jakarta] WHEN Indonesian President Joko Widodo rose to address his Asean counterparts over the weekend in Singapore, he rolled out some eye-watering numbers including a forecast that some US$90 billion worth of goods and services will be bought on the Internet by 2025 - a nine-fold increase from the amount today.

The trouble is - as the e-commerce's 800-pound gorillas like Alibaba Tencent and Amazon move in to carve up Asean's US$2.5 trillion economy, the region's startups are increasingly shut out of what is still a booming market.

Only 2 per cent of the retail sales are conducted online in Indonesia. In the UK, it was 24 per cent last year.