You are Ratna Halim, chief executive of Sari Wangi Nusantara, the Surabaya soap and detergent maker your grandfather founded in 1989. A global giant has just announced its entry into your core categories, and before its supermarket shelves go live in 120 days you must tell your family board where the fight will really be decided.
The situation
The notice arrived this morning, 4 May 2026: Continental Brands, a consumer-goods group with about USD 70 billion in worldwide revenue, has signed a national listing agreement with Indonesia's modern retail chains. It is putting USD 120 million, roughly Rp1.9 trillion, behind an eighteen-month launch in laundry and haircare: about six times your annual marketing budget. Its mass-market detergent will sit 12% below your price, and its stated goal is 15% of the national laundry market within eighteen months.
At home, SWN is no minnow. It turns over Rp4.2 trillion a year at a 13% EBITDA margin, leads laundry with 34% of national volume, and sells through 38 regional distributors and a fleet of motorbike reps who every week visit 480,000 warungs, the family kiosks where most Indonesians buy their soap. The reps extend informal credit and know most owners by name. Three plants, in Surabaya, Medan and Makassar, make products formulated for Indonesian water and hair.
Your analysts reckon that if nothing changes you will lose 8 to 12 share points in laundry, each worth about Rp95 billion of annual revenue. Several board members want to match the 12% cut across the whole portfolio; finance warns that would pull EBITDA from 13% towards 6%, about Rp290 billion of profit. Meanwhile supermarkets and minimarkets want higher slotting fees and threaten to drop your slower lines, and Continental's recruiters are offering your best regional sales managers 40% above market. To respond you have Rp350 billion, fixed for eighteen months, with no top-up.