Indonesia eyes foreign firms for more mergers

Bloomberg

Indonesia has almost 2,000 banks and a currency that’s plunged 11 percent since January, a combination overburdened regulators hope will prove irresistible to foreign acquirers.
The country’s lenders are in much better shape than during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, and have stood up well to the weakening of the rupiah this year, said Fauzi Ichsan, chief executive officer of the Indonesia Deposit Insurance Corp., known as LPS. “Consolidation will be good and with a weakening rupiah, it would be cheaper for global investors to buy our banks,” Ichsan said.
Even after a few recent mergers, Indonesia still has 115 conventional and Shariah banks and almost 1,800 rural lenders, catering to the archipelago’s more than 260 million people, data from the Financial Services Authority show.
As the government has warmed to the idea of foreign takeovers, Japanese banks in particular have stepped up, with Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc. announcing plans to gain control of local counterparts.
Meanwhile, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. has rekindled a long-running effort to sell its stake in family-controlled lender PT Bank Pan Indonesia, people with knowledge of the matter said.
The Southeast Asian nation doesn’t have a sufficient number of experienced finance staff to sustain so many institutions, said Ichsan.
“As a regulator we don’t have enough bank supervisors and the industry doesn’t have enough qualified bankers.”

Regulatory Hurdles
Indonesian regulations make it difficult — though not impossible — for foreign banks to invest more than 40 percent in local lenders. Singapore’s DBS Group Holdings Ltd. scrapped a bid to buy PT Bank Danamon Indonesia in 2013 after the ownership rule was introduced. Other deals have since been approved because they either involved buying two lenders and merging them, or purchasing distressed assets.
The rupiah has tumbled almost 11 percent since the emerging market selloff began in late January, prompting the central bank to raise interest rates four times and intensify market intervention by draining foreign reserves. But unlike the situation during the Asian crisis — when the rupiah endured a steeper collapse — Indonesia’s banks have so far been relatively unscathed, Ichsan said.

Better Indicators
“The key indicators for banks are far better now,” Ichsan said, recalling the hysteria that swept through the markets during the Asian crisis, when he was a bonds trader at Citigroup Inc. in Singapore.
Indonesia closed 16 lenders as the industry-wide capital adequacy ratio sank to a negative 15.7 percent, and nonperforming loans soared to almost 50 percent.
Now, the capital adequacy ratio for Indonesian banks stands at about 22 percent, among the highest in the region, while the gross nonperforming loan ratio has fallen to 2.7 percent, according to data from LPS, whose chairman is a member of the country’s Financial System Stability Committee. The agency has a record 101.3 trillion rupiah ($6.8 billion) available in the event it is called on to pay back savers should a bank fail, Ichsan said. That figure may reach 120 trillion rupiah by the end of next year, he added.