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ocal small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are set to receive more support from the government to digitalize their businesses.

Industry Minister Airlangga Hartarto said the ministry was working to provide programs to promote the digital SME industry such as the e-Smart IKM initiative, which provides training and guidance to SMEs to encourage online trading.

“According to the ministry’s data, the use of digital technology by SMEs is able to contribute to the country’s economic growth. It has become a dominant industry in pushing growth and that is why we will allocate more time and resources to developing it,” the minister said recently.

With over 54 million SMEs, Indonesia houses the largest volume of SMEs in Southeast Asia, but only a very small fraction of SMEs in Indonesia are connected to the internet.

SMEs account for 60 percent gross domestic product and provide jobs for almost 99 percent of workers.

Willix Halim, chief operating officer of local e-commerce platform Bukalapak, said his company’s efforts toward making vendor operations efficient had paid off largely in terms of vendor size increases as well as their transactional values and revenue.

Bukalapak elaborated that the average income of an SME that had already signed on with them reached Rp 5 million (US$375) to Rp 10 million a day. Currently, there are 1.3 million vendors on the platform, which is a 400 percent increase from the 400,000 vendors recorded in 2015.

Profit-wise, Bukalapak also saw a 700 percent increase in profits in 2016, helped by a transaction values of Rp 10 trillion in 2016 and 11.2 million users in that same year.

Cooperatives and Small and Medium Enterprises Minister Anak Agung Gede Nugrah Puspayoga believes the majority of Indonesian SMEs still need a lot of guidance in the digital market.

Communications and Information Minister Rudiantara said the large increases in e-commerce transaction values in 2016 served as further evidence of the digital economy’s impact and power on the Indonesian economy.

Other e-commerce platforms have also laid out plans to expand the number of vendors on their platforms by innovating the way they operate. For one, Alfa Group’s e-commerce wing Alfacart.com aims to increase the number of its vendors tenfold in 2017.

This is going by the platform’s performance, which recorded monthly growth of 15 to 20 percent in 2016, mostly thanks to grocery items usually bought through integration with Alfamart purchases.

Alfacart allows the option of purchasing goods online and picking them up at Alfamart stores, which the company says is able to increase traffic to both the site and also its stores.

“By making online to offline transactions easier, we also hope to further support the operations of small and medium businesses that are operating on Alfacart and also push more of them to go digital,” Alfacart.com CEO Catherine Hindra Sutjahyo said.