A GIANT WHO LOSE THEIR GRIP ON THE MARKET: A CASE OF PT. SARIWANGI

Tea is the second favorite beverage after water globally (Exhibit 1) due to the fact that it gives health benefits, such as increasing the function of blood vessel, battling the fatigue, decreasing the cholesterol ratio and keeping our body fit. Such benefits can be obtained by drinking tea routinely for about four to six times a day. People are consuming tea on daily basis for these benefits and the growing population has created a big market for worldwide tea producers including Indonesian market. Indonesia as a country itself has been a major tea producer and ranks as the seventh on the world’s largest tea producers list supported by large consumer increase.

Sariwangi, a domestic brand, was introduced back in 1973 with a ‘tea bag’ concept. This was a fresh and modern concept comparing to old concept tea which was the brewed tea. This concept made Sariwangi able to crawl to the top of tea market easily and became the biggest tea bag brand in Indonesia. In 1989, Unilever Indonesia, a consumer goods company has acquitted brand Sariwangi and started to act as the distributor of Sariwangi. For over 40 years, the brand Sariwangi has committed to give the best quality of tea for Indonesian tea consumer with lot of campaigns and innovations in between. The founder company has wished to increase the tea production and invested a large sum of money in drainage system. However the outcome didn’t go as expected and left them in a big debt. Big debt as well as the decreasing tea export volume resulted in bankruptcy of the founder company of Sariwangi in 2018 as the tea bag of the brand Sariwangi will still be produced by Unilever Indonesia.