Promos And Big Discounts Make Digital Company Russ, The Government Must Set Ecommerce And Ride-Hailing Business Models

JAKARTA - Executive Director of the Center of Economic and Law Studies (Celios) Bhima Yudhistira said that big promos and discounts that digital companies often do, such as e-commerce and ride-hailing companies, need to start being regulated by the government.

"The government must start regulating the e-commerce and ride-hailing business models that carry out promos and discounts on a large scale to maintain market sharing which makes business competition in the digital sector unhealthy," he said in an official statement quoted by Antara, Friday, November 18.

He said the constant promos and discounts given to consumers would burden the finances of digital companies and could harm companies whose funding began to decrease.

"Digital companies should encourage more feature competitions that consumers really need," he said.

He estimates that the wave of layoffs is risky for various other digital service companies ranging from fintech, edutech, and healthtech, due to increasingly fierce investor search competition amid the threat of a global recession in 2023.

Previously, GoTo announced that it would reduce the number of employees by terminating employment (PHK) on 1,300 people or about 12 percent of the total GoTo Group permanent employees.

Bhima added that the government must ensure that permanent employees and contract employees who experience layoffs get their rights according to employment regulations.

"Because the layoff scale is massive, the Ministry of Manpower must create a post to accommodate if there are workers' rights that are not paid in full, or suspended such as severance pay, and so on," said Bhima.

The government is also considered to need to prepare new jobs, for example through SOEs to immediately absorb employees who have been laid off so that their skills do not disappear because they are unemployed for too long.

"Because the victims of digital notabene layoffs are high-skill workers. Meanwhile, Indonesia is estimated to still have a gap of 9 million workers in the digital ecosystem," he said.