RI Still Imports 60 Pct Of Heavy Equipment

Jakarta, June 14 (Antara) - Indonesia is now able to produce various components of heavy equipment badly needed in infrastructure development but about 60 pct of the 12 to 20 thousand units needed every year are still imported, an official said. "Of the need, only about 8,000 units are supplied by domestic products," Dede Suatmadi, the head of Factory, Agriculture and Heavy Equipment Industry Unit of the Industry Minister, told a discussion here on Monday. The home-made heavy equipment is st ill produced by foreign investment companies such as Caterpillar, Hitachi, Sumitomo, and Komatsu whose local components are only about 60 percent. He said that it was these companies and the trademarks of their products which developed in Indonesia, despite the fact the bodies and components of these products, except their machines, could already be produced by the Indonesian people themselves. "This is because it needs huge capital. We have the human resources. We can also buy experts. We have the opportunity to produce only heavy equipment below 30 tons, particularly machines for plantation needs. We offer the production of equipment of 70 tons up to 300 tons to advanced nations because we could not compete," he said. Competition in the heavy equipment global market now is increasingly stiffer due to increasing stocks in advanced nations, the weakening demand in Europe and the slow economic growth in China that led China to look at the Indonesian market for its heavy equipment products. Expert staff of the research and technology minister for transportation affairs I Wayan Budiastra regretted that the fact that Indonesia had always only become the market for other countries, while what it was really needed was the development of its factories which would raise Indonesia`s added values. "Actually, we can use the result of researches of the Indonesian researchers," he said. According to Dede, foreign companies so far are not available to use the research results of Indonesian researchers. This is because they prefer to using the results of their own researches. They like to make investment whose nature is flexible for relocation. "The prototypes of the results of our research should have been done buy state-owned companies (BUMN), for example, by state-owned electronic firm PT LEN for electronic components. So, we should not rely on foreign firms only," he said.