Saturday, 19 September 2026 · Daily Market Intel

Market IntelSat, 19 Sept

Gunawan family reviews a US$1 billion sale of its 1968 ingredients maker.

Ingredients focus · repayments · SME credit

Someone's payday
- Which Indonesian business is worth US$1 billion? A 58-year-old flavour ingredients supplier — Caproasia
  EQT, the Swedish buyout group that buys companies with investors' money, and Indonesia's founding Gunawan family are reviewing a sale of Indesso at a reported US$1 billion. Robertus Hartanto Gunawan started the flavour and aroma ingredients firm in 1968.
  Positive-sum angle: The value sits in the middle of the chain, between a crop and a shelf, and that middle pays growers, distillers and testing labs to stay put. A billion-dollar mark on a Jakarta processor tells the next family firm what its own position is worth.
  What's the impact: Indonesian operators in agri-processing should be courting buyout funds rather than venture funds; the money in this category buys audited plant and a customer book, not growth curves. Fifty-eight years of paperwork is the asset being priced.
Your costs
- What a Thai household now owes: US$24,000, with US$660 a month going to repayments — The Nation Thailand
  The University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce surveyed 1,720 people from 7 to 13 September. Average household debt reached US$24,000, up 7.3% in a year and the highest since the survey began in 2009. Two in three borrowers missed a payment.
  Positive-sum angle: Just under a quarter of the borrowing sits outside banks, at rates nobody publishes. Every point that moves into the formal system gives a household a rate it can compare, and gives payroll and savings products a market they can price.
  What's the impact: Thai consumer brands and employers should price for a customer whose US$660 (THB21,935) a month is committed before rent. Payroll-linked savings and wage-advance products meet their sharpest market among Bangkok shift workers this quarter.
The tool
- Turned down seven times in ten? Thailand's central bank opens an SME credit portal in December — The Nation Thailand
  The Bank of Thailand will open an online portal in December where a small firm posts what it needs and compares offers from commercial banks, virtual banks and non-bank lenders. Lending to small firms has shrunk for 16 straight quarters, with 60% to 70% of applications refused.
  Positive-sum angle: Refusal is mostly an information problem: the lender cannot see the business. A shared portal, plus the alternative-data checks the central bank is building beside it, turns a merchant's own sales records into collateral and widens the pool past those who own property.
  What's the impact: Thai operators should have twelve months of sales, payment and platform records export-ready before December, because the portal underwrites what it can read. Nobody has built the layer that formats a Thai shophouse's records for a lender, and that is the opening.

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