Indonesian Brands Dethrone Global Competitors at Transform Awards Asia

For decades, Indonesia has been a place where global brands come to grow. That narrative shifted on 20 November 2025. At the Transform Awards Asia ceremony in Shanghai, two Indonesian brands beat international competitors at one of the world's most rigorous brand competitions.

The message is hard to ignore: Indonesia is not just a market for global brands. It is now producing them.

AZKO Takes Gold, Becoming Indonesia's First Retail Brand to Do So

The bigger of the two wins belongs to AZKO, the company formerly known as ACE Hardware Indonesia. AZKO won Gold for Best Brand Experience at Transform Awards Asia 2025, becoming the first Indonesian retail brand to claim a gold at the competition. It also picked up two Silver awards.

The backstory matters. For 29 years, the company operated under a franchise agreement with ACE Hardware International. It paid an estimated IDR 40 to 45 billion (~US$2.6 million) per month in licensing fees and was required to stock imported products. When that franchise agreement ended on 31 December 2024, the company did not retreat. It reinvented.

The rebrand was not cosmetic. AZKO committed IDR 200 to 250 billion (~US$15 million) in store expansion and spent IDR 14 billion (~US$860,000) renovating its flagship experience store. Inside those stores, a new concept called Idea Spots replaced traditional product aisles with lifestyle room setups designed to inspire. A bedroom corner showing space-saving furniture. A living area built for home entertainment. The idea was to shift the experience from fixing things to imagining what your home could become.

The launch on New Year's Eve 2024 drew more than 150,000 Indonesian consumers. The financial base supporting this move was strong: AZKO reported IDR 574.22 billion (~US$35 million) in net profit in Q3 2024, up 18% year on year, on sales of IDR 6.11 trillion (~US$374 million), up nearly 14%.

"The AZKO success story shows how investing in your brand can become a multiplier for business performance," said Joël Céré, Managing Director for Southeast Asia at Landor, the agency behind the rebrand. "Brand is what turns scale into meaning and transactions into loyalty."

SMBC Indonesia Wins Silver for Audio Branding

SMBC Indonesia, the banking group that traces its current form to the 2019 merger of PT Bank BTPN and PT Bank Sumitomo Mitsui Indonesia, claimed Silver for Best Audio Brand at the same ceremony.

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The bank was formally renamed SMBC Indonesia in October 2024. It is now the first SMBC entity to offer full retail and wholesale banking services outside Japan under the SMBC name. That is a significant positioning: a Japanese parent bank choosing Indonesia as the global launchpad for its brand.

Its winning sonic identity was built using traditional Indonesian musical instruments. The strategy was deliberate: a global bank needs to earn local trust, and SMBC Indonesia chose to do that through sound. The brand philosophy, Do Good, Be Great, is anchored by the Daya Program, a community empowerment initiative serving customers from low-income individuals to large corporates.

What This Signals for Asian Marketing Leaders

Brand investment is sometimes treated as a marketing budget line item. The AZKO and SMBC Indonesia wins suggest a different way of thinking about it. Landor's APAC president has noted that brand can represent up to a third of a company's total value.

These two Indonesian brands are now on the global record as evidence for that claim. For marketing leaders across Asia watching from the sidelines, that is a data point worth taking seriously.