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nited States auto giant General Motors (GM) recently revived its plant in Bekasi, West Java, and started selling its new minivan, the Chevrolet Spin, to Indonesian customers. This move marked its stepped-up effort to grab a bigger market share in Southeast Asia's second largest automobile market, where it wants to expand by 10-fold by the decade's end. The Jakarta Post's Linda Yulisman talked to Timothy E. Lee GM vice president of global manufacturing and president of international operations, to gain insight into how the firm wants to grow. Below are excerpts of the interview.

Question: You said that GM wants to stay in Indonesia and grab a 10 percent market share in the country by 2020. Could you tell us how you will achieve that? And will you develop specific products for the local market to attain your goal?

Answer: You can be sure that we are looking at additional products to deploy in the Indonesian market. Starting with customers: What do customers need and want? In our global portfolio products, there are a number of things that we can do in Indonesia.

Let's do the math ' if the Indonesian car market hits 2 million in 2020 ' my estimate ' 10 percent of 2 million will be 200,000 units; so the plant in Bekasi is a small plant.

The best case scenario is 60,000 units produced per year at Bekasi.

So, we better have a place to build more cars.

We need more production facilities, which means more jobs.

It might mean engine plants, transmission plants, assembly plants or stamping plant.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

We need to grow the brand today and think about building more capacity later.

But if the vision comes true then we need more capacity. I'm very optimistic.

How do you assess the role of emerging markets in your global operation and how do you put Indonesia in that context?

Well, it's interesting.

All discussions are about BRIC ' Brazil, Russia, India and China ' but there is also a collection of countries that I call CIVETS ' Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa.

So, when I think of emerging markets, I don't only think about BRIC, but also about a wide range of countries and of course Indonesia is included in that concept.

GM's initial public offering was in 2010.

The investment thesis was based on the fact that GM is number one in the US and the US was coming out of recession.

So, although growth potential is available in the US, number one is the BRIC.

We had leverage in emerging markets and leverage in the US.

That exact same comment is true today, and we think about emerging markets more broadly than just the famous BRIC.

Do you have a particular strategy for emerging markets?

Generally, our strategy is to build where we sell and we want to buy our components where we build.

We look at economic models, gross domestic product [GDP] per capita, the density of the current car park in a country and growth potential.

Many factors are taken into consideration when we make the decision to invest in facilities to build vehicles, and those decisions are critical because we don't want to build capacity in an area where we won't get the volume needed to pay back the investment.

We placed a US$150 million bet in Indonesia, and I'm very confident this is a good business for us.

Now GM is sourcing only about 40 percent of its raw material from ASEAN countries. Do you have any intention to get more materials locally?

The idea is to build where we sell, and then buy components locally where we build cars and trucks.

There are several reasons for that: avoidance of logistics expense and working closer in generating more purchasing-power within a country.

All of that makes more and more sense as scale and volumes go higher, and then we can prefer to make good investment.

So that's exactly what we plan to do.

There's another reason why any business wants to do that ' that is to de-risk the business from foreign currency changes.

Is GM interested in joining in the low-cost green car program that will be launched by the government?

We will look in detail at whatever the Indonesian government about this eco-car opportunity.

We have many ideas in our current global portfolio that could be explored.

I'm quite interested to see the formal declaration and then we can compare it to current offers in our global portfolio.

Currently domestic car sales in Indonesia are mostly concentrated in Java. How will you ensure GM cars also reach other islands?

In Indonesia, like in China or other emerging markets, the growth in GDP per capita is what I would describe as 'lumpy'.

There are some areas in the country that have higher GDP per capita and other areas that are lower.

But, as that growth rate in per capita income gets to the other islands and people become more likely to think about buying four-wheel vehicles, Chevrolet will be there for it.

That would mean we would widen our distribution pattern. But there would be someone in the other islands who want to have a Chevrolet store and that's the kind of entrepreneurs that we're looking for to represent our products for our customers.