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We've spun the wheel for the Emerging Markets bucket (~2,200 companies). The ticker has landed on a conglomerate from the world's fourth most populous country. A company woven into the daily life of hundreds of millions of people that almost nobody outside Southeast Asia has heard of.

Before we dive in, a reminder of what the index itself has delivered over time.

Every week, we pull one company at random from the FTSE All-World with ~4,200 companies representing 90% of global stock market wealth. We share the index's long-term returns as a reminder of why we're here: the long game. New to the newsletter? Start here.

Founded in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange.

One number before we start.

Indonesia has about 100 vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants. The US has ~860. Germany ~590. Brazil ~250. Even neighbouring Malaysia has ~490.

Indonesia is the fourth most populous country on earth with 280 million people. By global standards, it’s still early in its motorisation story. More roads. More middle class. More people who will want a car or a motorcycle.

Astra International sells more than half of them.

A few key facts:

Here is something worth pausing on: Astra's annual revenue is larger than its entire market capitalisation. That doesn't happen often with a business of this quality.

Astra was founded on 20 February 1957 by William Soeryadjaya, a Chinese-Indonesian entrepreneur who had lost both parents by the age of 12 and left school at 19. He started out selling newspapers, rice, and sugar. The early Astra was a distributor of soft drinks and agricultural goods. The name came from the Latin word for stars.

The pivot came through relationships. In 1971, Astra secured the rights to form a joint venture with Toyota, becoming the exclusive agent for Toyota vehicles in Indonesia. Honda motorcycles followed, then Daihatsu. Within a decade, Astra had captured close to half the country's automotive market.

But Soeryadjaya's story has a painful chapter.

In 1992, his eldest son's bank collapsed under a credit crisis. Soeryadjaya could have walked away. Instead, he personally guaranteed every depositor their money back, with interest, without a single rupiah of government bailout. To honour that guarantee, he sold most of his family's stake in Astra, the empire he had spent 35 years building.

Every depositor was made whole. Soeryadjaya lost the company.

He is still remembered for this in Indonesia today. His story is taught in business schools not as a cautionary tale, but as a lesson in integrity.

Astra's core is still the car.

It is the exclusive distributor and assembler for Toyota, Daihatsu, Isuzu, and BMW in Indonesia, as well as Honda motorcycles. It doesn't just sell vehicles. It manufactures components, runs dealerships, and provides after-sales service across the archipelago. And if an Indonesian buys a Toyota on credit, Astra likely sold the car, financed the loan, and insured the vehicle too. The entire chain, from factory to forecourt to finance, runs through the same company.

Beyond automotive, Astra operates in six other segments. Through United Tractors, it is the sole distributor for Komatsu heavy equipment in Indonesia and one of the country's largest coal mining contractors. Its agribusiness arm, Astra Agro Lestari, is the third-largest private palm oil grower in Indonesia. It operates toll roads and water utilities. It has IT and property businesses.

What ties all of it together is Indonesia itself. Each segment is a bet on the same underlying story: a large, young, developing country still building out its infrastructure, its middle class, and its consumption.

One footnote on ownership: after Soeryadjaya sold his stake and the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis hit, Astra's shares ended up in government hands and were eventually auctioned off. The winner was Jardine Cycle & Carriage, a subsidiary of Jardine Matheson, a British conglomerate founded in 1832 as one of the great trading houses of Asia. Today Jardine holds 50.1% of Astra. The other 49.9% is publicly traded which means some of it is yours.

The biggest challenge facing Astra right now is familiar: Chinese electric vehicles.

BYD, Chery, and Wuling have entered Indonesia aggressively with cheaper battery-electric cars. By 2026, EVs had reached around 15% of monthly car sales. A sharp jump in a short period of time.

Astra's bet is on hybrids as the transition technology. Indonesia's charging infrastructure is thin across 17,000 islands. The electricity grid is patchy outside Java. For most Indonesians, a plug-in EV is simply not yet practical. A hybrid is. Toyota, Astra's most important partner, is expanding its hybrid lineup faster than its full-EV range, and is now beginning local EV production in Indonesia for the first time.

Whether Indonesian consumers adopt hybrids as a bridge, or leapfrog straight to full EVs as Chinese brands get cheaper, is the central question for the next decade.

Astra's revenue in 2025 was $20B. Net profit was approximately $2.0B. Both declined slightly from 2024, mainly due to lower coal prices and a weak car market. Not a structural story, but a cyclical one. The company has paid consistent dividends for decades, currently yielding around 7–8%.

The stock has been roughly flat in local currency terms since its 2017 peak, weighed down by the cyclical nature of autos and commodities, the conglomerate structure, and more recently the EV uncertainty. The result is a forward P/E of around 6x for a business that dominates the automotive market of a 280-million-person country with some of the lowest vehicle penetration rates in the world.

Here is what Astra ultimately is.

A company positioned at the intersection of three long, slow, powerful trends: Indonesia's population growth, its rising incomes, and its ongoing infrastructure buildout. Each new road, each new suburb, each step up the income ladder creates demand for exactly what Astra sells.

The motorisation of Indonesia is not finished. It may not even be halfway done.

Every index fund investor with emerging market exposure almost certainly owns a slice of Astra International. We had no idea it was in there. Did you?

Images and data sourced from Astra International full year financial statements 2025 and Jardine Cycle & Carriage annual reports.

Next week, we'll be looking at a company from North America.