Jakarta. Indonesia and other ASEAN nations are racing to keep as much foreign capital flowing in, according to a minister, as everyone banks on reforms to woo investors.

Investment Minister Rosan Roeslani said on Wednesday that the popularity would hinge on how fast a country can cut its bureaucratic red tape. The Prabowo Subianto administration needs to amass a whopping Rp 13 quadrillion ($727 billion) from investors for the economy to grow by the targeted 8%, making a “better investment climate” an imperative.

“We have to keep reforming ourselves in terms of policy and regulation. Because we are competing with our neighboring countries,” Rosan told Investor Daily Summit in Jakarta.

“They are always reforming and improving their policies and regulations, so it’d be faster, more accurate, measured, and structured.”

Jakarta’s strategy to become an investor magnet includes integrating all licensing procedures into one platform, namely the “one single submission” system, while also leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain.

The Investment Ministry will also take over the immigration office’s job of granting foreign workers temporary stay permits, which declare how long they can be in the country.

Rosan promised that Jakarta would meet the “service level agreement” of completing the investment procedures by a set deadline. Investors will automatically get the permit if the government fails to respond to their application within the timeframe.

OCBC’s latest report wrote that Singapore became the ASEAN nation that attracted the most foreign direct investment (FDI). In 2024, Microsoft unveiled a $1.7 billion AI and cloud investment in Indonesia. Malaysia, however, received a much larger commitment of $2.2 billion from the American tech powerhouse. European businesses are mostly eyeing a Vietnamese expansion, with Indonesia ranking second, according to a 2026 survey by the EU-ASEAN Business Council. Thailand, too, has become a hotspot for electric vehicle investment — a sector that the mineral-rich Indonesia is also eyeing.

These ASEAN nations, however, are both Jakarta’s rivals and FDI sources. 

Government data put Singapore as Indonesia’s largest foreign investor at $8.8 billion between January and June 2026. The government, however, had repeatedly stated that a bulk of these investments were actually Indonesian money routed through Singaporean financial hubs. Malaysian FDI reached the $1 billion mark in the first half, putting the neighbor as the sixth-biggest source.

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