An engineer who learnt to count the cost of owning

The first thing I ever costed was a microwave hop between two hills in West Java. In September 1999 I joined PT Samudrel Seluler, a mobile operator, as a transmission engineer, two months after completing a telecommunications engineering degree at Kencavira Institute of Technology in Bandung. My work was to plan the links that carried traffic from cell sites back to switching centres. I learnt that a link which looked inexpensive on a drawing could become costly once the land rent, the power supply, the spare radio and the maintenance visit were counted.

Those visits made me curious about the budget that paid for them. In 2004 the operator's finance team was looking for someone who could read a network plan, and I moved into capital-expenditure control. I studied accounting part-time for three years at Rendamaya School of Accountancy while doing the job. My first lesson in finance was humbling: engineers, including me, had treated an approved budget as permission to spend, while finance needed to know when the money would leave and in which currency. Almost every radio, antenna and switch we bought was priced in United States dollars.

From 2009 I led financial planning for the operator. The work included the economics of spectrum, which taught me the difference between an asset you buy once and an obligation you carry every year. Our licence fees followed a formula set by the communications ministry, and the company had also committed to an upfront payment for additional spectrum. I built the plan so that those payments were visible years ahead, rather than appearing as an unwelcome surprise in a single budget round. I also worked with the network directors on how many sites each region truly needed.

In 2014 the operator's Singapore shareholder, Tembavari Holdings, asked me to join its regional treasury team. For two and a half years I worked on dollar funding and currency exposure across its investments in three Southeast Asian markets. Singapore broadened my view of lenders and of how a regional investor compares businesses that earn in different currencies. It also made one pattern clear: companies that borrowed in dollars because the coupon was lower often paid for the decision later, when their own currency weakened.

I returned to Jakarta in July 2016 to lead treasury at PT Lintasvara Nusantara, then a private company moving from fixed-wireless towers into fibre broadband. We raised a US$260 million syndicated loan in 2018 to fund the build, and I argued for more of it to be hedged than the lenders required. I was only partly persuasive. I then led the financial preparation for the company's listing on the Indonesia Stock Exchange in December 2019, including the first public explanation of our subscriber figures.

I became finance director in April 2021 and joined the board of directors. The role has asked me to make choices that are uncomfortable for people I respect. The family that founded the company wanted the full proceeds of a tower sale. Our commercial director wanted every new city opened at once. Our president director preferred the cheapest-looking loan. In each case I tried to set out the alternatives fairly, state who would carry each risk and accept that the board of directors, not finance alone, makes the decision.

I lead through managers who know more than I do in their fields: tax, treasury, control, planning, procurement finance and investor relations. I ask them to bring me the uncomfortable number early. I still visit network sites, partly from habit and partly because a distribution point with empty ports explains a forecast better than a spreadsheet does.

Indonesia's two-tier structure has shaped how I think about governance. As a member of the board of directors I propose and carry out decisions; the board of commissioners supervises us and can refuse. The best commissioners I have reported to rarely asked for more data. They asked who had disagreed with a proposal, what we would do if the rupiah moved against us again, and whether a number meant the same thing this year as last. Their questions improved my papers more than any template could, and they are the kind of questions I now want to ask from the other side of the table.

I am now ready to contribute to another company's board in a non-executive capacity. I understand capital-intensive businesses that collect revenue monthly and pay for equipment years in advance, often in another currency. I also know the limits of that experience. I would need to learn a new company's operations before offering opinions about them, and I would bring questions before conclusions.

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