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t certain times it may be reasonable for Indonesians to consume foreign-made goods as it could help open the door for local producers to export their products in return, a minister has said.

Trade Minister Enggartiasto Lukita, along with several government officials from Indonesia and Japan, inaugurated the first Lumine store in Indonesia in Jakarta on Friday. Japan-based retail chain Lumine offers a multi-brand shopping experience for Japanese apparel, household accessories and cuisine.

The 2,000-square-meter store in the upscale Plaza Indonesia mall sells over 17,000 items, all of which are Japanese made.

While it sells imported goods, Time International, the local license holder of Lumine, has started to train local small enterprises and designers to begin supplying products to the store, Enggartiasto said.

“What is interesting is their commitment and efforts to collaborate with our [small and medium enterprises],” Enggartiasto said during the inauguration. “Thanks to opening ourselves up to Lumine as a foreign brand, we are about to become part of the global supply chain.” He said there was no target yet as to when local products would enter Lumine’s Jakarta branch as it would take some time to train the designers and SMEs to create goods that met the store’s standards.

However, he gave an assurance that once local products passed Lumine’s quality control, they would be exported to its other stores worldwide, including in Japan.

“It should be simple for us to lure them into setting up their production base here. So long as we can show our commitment and offer them cheaper and more comfortable investments, they will come,” said Enggartiasto, adding that he hoped to see Lumine starting its local production base in the future. Time International president and CEO Irwan Mussry said the training program for local designers to create products in accordance with Lumine’s standards had started last year, supervised by the Indonesian Fashion Chamber (IFC).

Irwan declined to reveal the size of the investment in opening the store nor its sales target, but said that the 15 Lumine branches in Japan booked over US$1 billion in transactions last year alone. Nor did he elaborate on Lumine’s market approach in Indonesia, but said that it would answer to the market rather than dictating to it.

While Lumine expands its business to Jakarta, numerous imported brands have pulled out of the Indonesian market amid dwindling sales and fierce competition with online commerce platforms.

Earlier this year, several imported brands, such as GAP, Banana Republic, Clarks and Dorothy Perkins, closed their stores across the country.

Based on The Jakarta Post observation, some of the brands have recently returned to the market, but on online platforms. Meanwhile, multibrand retailer PT Mitra Adiperkasa (MAP) announced last month that it would take over the Indonesian operation of Clarks, a British footwear company.

Around the same time, department store chains Lotus and Debenhams, which were also operated by MAP, have closed all of their stores. The management cited shifting interests from younger customers into shopping in more specialized outlets as the reason for the closures.

The government is also striving to cut imports of consumer goods that have partly affected Indonesia’s trade balance and current account deficit. It issued Finance Ministerial Regulation (PMK) No.110/2018 in September, which stipulates an import tax increase of up to 10 percent for 1,147 consumer goods.

After the PMK regulation was issued, the ministry claimed in November that consumer-good imports had dropped by 41 percent on a daily average.