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etter performing companies in Indonesia have adoped a successful formula to cope with the slower economic growth nationwide; boosting efficiency and taking well calculated risks to weather the storm.

Unilever Indonesia, the top-performing blue-chip in the Jakarta Composite Index (JCI) in 2015, countered lower demand nationwide through '€œattacking all internal inefficiencies'€, especially by paying greater scrutiny to marketing costs, president director Hemant Bakshi said in a recent interview with The Jakarta Post.

The company'€™s shares, UNVR, have soared 23.8 percent year-to-date (ytd), defying the 8.1 percent fall in the JCI, with the company'€™s market capitalization now already swelling to Rp 305 trillion (US$22.5 billion), the third-largest on the bourse.

'€œThis is a great opportunity for us to look at everything we do internally and find all opportunities to save costs, to attack any internal inefficiencies,'€ he said at Unilever Indonesia'€™s headquarters in Jakarta.

'€œIn difficult times, every penny we spend on marketing costs we scrutinize much more: Does it give a return or not? If we find that some of our expenditure does not generate much return, then we question it and put that money behind something that will give us a return,'€ explained Bakshi.

In the first half of this year, total costs to the producer of Buavita, Blue Band, Dove, Molto, Rexona, Sariwangi, Sunlight, Walls, among other products, rose 16.3 percent year-on-year (yoy) to Rp 5.6 trillion, but the expenses were compensated by Rp 18.8 trillion booked in sales that surged 6.9 percent compared to the first half of last year.

The rising costs, Bakshi argued, did not indicate surging inefficiencies. Rather it was a reflection of Unilever'€™s new strategy of beefing up advertisement spending in unconventional media like the Internet to support its core brands such as Pepsodent toothpaste, Lifebuoy soap or Bango soy sauce.

The new strategy might be a well-calculated risk worth the taking, the Unilever president director argued. '€œ[An economic slowdown] does not mean that we will reduce marketing spending, it means that we will shift money to places that matter most.'€

In the banking sector, the best strategy for weathering the economic slowdown was to focus on spurring innovation in new banking products and reducing the cost of funds, Jahja Setiaaatmadja, the president director of Bank Central Asia (BCA), said recently.

BCA'€™s new products included a mortgage scheme with capped interest rates to provide certainty for borrowers, as well as the lucky draw scheme for consumer credit that so far had been successful in attracting new loans, said Jahja.

This year, the privately owned lender has boldly cut its deposit rates six times, each by 25 basis points, to the current range of 5.75'€“6.25 percent. Surprisingly, third-party fund figures remain healthy with depositors showing little interest in moving their funds away from BCA despite the lower deposit rates.

Amid a tighter liquidity environment and weak credit demand, BCA'€™s first-half net profits grew 8 percent yoy to top Rp 8.5 trillion, a relatively sound performance compared to a mere 3.5 percent net-profit rise in Bank Mandiri, 1.1 percent increase in Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI), or the 50.8 percent fall recorded by Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI).

This year, the stock price of BCA has remained relatively unchanged at a time when the shares of BRI, Bank Mandiri and BNI have all become the major laggards in the benchmark index in 2015, each falling by more than 10 percent ytd.

'€œIn the market, Unilever and BCA have become the safe havens amid this economic slowdown,'€ said Tiesha Narandha Putri, an analyst with Samuel Sekuritas.

This was because the cost efficiency in Unilever was particularly noticeable, while healthy earnings growth was expected to be maintained at BCA, she added.

Publicly listed fuel distributor AKR Corporindo, whose shares have already risen 40 percent ytd to become one of the local bourse'€™s top movers in 2015, also said it benefitted from internal efficiencies, in addition to the company'€™s strategy of hedging its US dollar costs.

AKR Corporindo had hedged between 55 and 60 percent of its petroleum import-related costs valued at around $1.6 billion every year, corporate secretary Suresh Vembu said.

'€œIn this kind of situation, we work on improving the efficiency of our supply chain and ensuring proper hedging against commodity prices and exchange rates,'€ said Vembu, whose company booked a 61 percent yoy rise in net profits that hit Rp 605 billion in the first half of this year.