Two of the region’s biggest tech firms just had their margin set by a president

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The way it ends is a sentence read out in the Jakarta parliament complex on 23 June, by two executives who flew in to say yes. Catherine Hindra Sutjahyo, deputy chief executive of GoTo, said that from 1 July, Gojek would take 8 percent of a GoRide fare. Neneng Goenadi, who runs Grab in Indonesia, said GrabBike would do the same. Two of the largest technology companies in Southeast Asia had just announced, in adjacent breaths and identical numbers, a change to the most important line in their model, and they announced it standing next to a deputy speaker of the house rather than next to a balance sheet.

The number that mattered before that day was 20. That was roughly the share an ojek platform could keep from a motorcycle fare, the take rate, the thing that turned millions of small cash-equivalent transactions a day into a business. From 1 July it is 8, because in his May Day address President Prabowo Subianto said drivers, who do the sweating, should get at least 92 percent, and the companies who get the money should get less. (He put it more directly than that, which is part of why it worked.) It became Presidential Regulation 27/2026. It is the line item, and it now belongs to him.

When your whole business is a percentage of someone else’s transaction, that percentage is something you are allowed to keep, for now, by people who can change their minds.

Here is the thing worth saying plainly, because it is the whole lesson and the rest is detail. When your whole business is a percentage of someone else’s transaction, that percentage is something you are allowed to keep, for now, by people who can change their minds.

You can watch the markets do the arithmetic in real time, which is the useful part. When the policy first surfaced, GoTo fell 5.56 percent to Rp51 in a morning. Mandiri Sekuritas reckoned the cut could effectively wipe out the adjusted EBITDA contribution of GoTo’s on-demand segment, which had carried roughly 48 percent of group performance in the first quarter. Read that twice: close to half of where the profit was actually coming from, contingent on a rate that a president decided, in public, on Labour Day, was twelve points too high. GoTo said the new structure would create challenges for its two-wheel operations and require careful management to balance driver earnings, consumer affordability and the long-term health of the ecosystem, which is the polite way an operator says someone has just legislated against its margin and it intends to keep smiling while it absorbs the hit.

Mandiri Sekuritas reckoned the cut could effectively wipe out the adjusted EBITDA contribution of GoTo’s on-demand segment, which had carried roughly 48 percent of group performance in the first quarter.

And yet the platforms walked into the room. They did not litigate it, they did not threaten to leave their biggest market, they sent their Indonesia chiefs to stand beside the deputy speaker and say the number out loud. That is the tell. When the state has taken equity through its wealth fund Danantara, framed the change as a radical correction of an unfair sector, and attached it to the welfare of millions of voters who own a smartphone and a Honda, the move stops being a negotiation you can win and becomes a cost of operating where the riders are, paid the way you pay rent.

So the question for everyone smaller, the regional operator whose deck shows a take-rate line trending up and to the right, is which single rule, passed in which single room, would do to their unit economics what 27/2026 did to GoRide’s. The food platform skimming the restaurant. The marketplace clipping the seller. The lender pricing off a spread the regulator can compress. The honest exercise is to name that rule, write it on a card, and ask what revenue the business would still have the morning after it passed. If the answer is very little, the take rate was only ever a permission someone else can revoke.

The motorcycle still runs the same route on 2 July. The rider keeps more of it. The line in Jakarta where the profit used to sit is twelve points thinner, and nobody in that parliament room had to touch a single throttle to move it.