T

he government has promised to further support the country'€™s growing creative industry not only through sales promotion efforts but also through bilateral cooperation with the country'€™s main trading partners.

The Trade Ministry'€™s director general for national export development, Nus Nuzulia Ishak, said the creative industry should be supported nationwide as Indonesia had a large base of young creative entrepreneurs involved in different fields.

'€œThe creative industry has a big potential to grow domestically and be exported globally. Currently, we can focus on expanding it in the domestic market and start to expand for exports afterwards,'€ Nus said recently.

As part of the efforts to support growth, Nus said the government would help in opening market access for the creative industry domestically and globally through bilateral cooperation as well as promotions and distributions.

Despite having a huge number of young people, Indonesia still sees a small contribution from the creative industry, which accounted for only 7.8 percent of the total gross domestic product (GDP) between 2010 and 2013, according to Central Statistics Agency (BPS) data.

On the Trade Ministry side, Nus said the ministry'€™s most recent effort was its endorsement of the third Baros International Animation Festival (BIAF) 2015, which would be held on Oct. 7-10 this year in Baros, a subdistrict of Cimahi, West Java.

Baros subdistrict was dubbed in 2012 by the previous administration as an area for creative industry, particularly animation and film, making it the only area in Indonesia which has an integrated creative center for IT.

Cimahi itself has been appointed as one of the planned 100 technoparks across Indonesia outlined by the President Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo administration in its pledge to improve research and science in Southeast Asia'€™s biggest economy.

'€œThe BIAF event has successfully promoted new local animators and connected them to their global counterparts and investors in the past two years. We hope the event this year will attract more publishers and investors, including foreign ones,'€ Nus said.

Nus said the ministry'€™s support for the event was based on the fact that Indonesia'€™s exports of animation, video, film and photography products, as subsectors of the creative industry, only stood at US$66 million as of 2013.

The amount was far smaller than imported animation products, which amounted to $2.3 billion in 2013, showing a lack of supply from local producers to fill rising domestic demand as Indonesia'€™s middle-income population grows, Nus said.

According to the former tourism and creative economy ministry, which is now separated into two separate institutions, Indonesia recognizes 15 categories of the creative industry, including fashion and handicrafts as well as film, video and photography.

Harry Waluyo, the main secretary for the Creative Economy Agency, said the subsector of animation, film, video and photography only contributed 2 percent to Indonesia'€™s total creative industry, even though the country'€™s population was starting to grasp more digital developments.

'€œI think the efforts to develop this subsector should be focused more on the digital side, such as for smartphone applications, because we know that the number of mobile phones in the country has surpassed the total population. App development needs less investment than making films and videos,'€ Harry said.