🏢 About Kuartal

Why Kuartal Exists

Indonesia is entering a decade that will decide what kind of economy it becomes. Capital is repricing risk across emerging markets, industrial policy is redrawing the map of global supply chains, and a generation of Indonesian professionals, investors, and policymakers is hungry for analysis that treats the country not as a footnote to global markets, but as a subject worthy of rigorous, independent scrutiny in its own right.

Kuartal was founded on a simple premise: Indonesia — and Southeast Asia more broadly — deserves financial and economic journalism with the intellectual seriousness of The Economist, the market fluency of Bloomberg, and the analytical depth of a hedge fund research desk. Not aggregation. Not press-release journalism. Analysis that explains why things happen, not just what happened — and that helps readers build durable mental models for understanding capital, policy, and power.

The name reflects the discipline we hold ourselves to: a kuartal, a quarter, is the rhythm by which markets, companies, and policymakers are judged. It is a short enough window to demand rigor, and a long enough one to reward patience — which is exactly the balance we try to strike in everything we publish.

Our Team

Kuartal was founded by Diemas Sukma Hawkins, who built the publication around the conviction that Indonesia’s economic story is under-analyzed relative to its importance — and that the tools of institutional research and publishing, historically reserved for large financial institutions, should be available to a broader audience of serious, curious readers. Under his direction, Kuartal has grown from a single editorial voice into a multi-line institution spanning publishing, research, and investment. We are currently a community of dozens of academic professionals, journalists, experts, and industry stakeholders all committed to our mission of making information more accessible and accurate to everyday investors.

What We Do

Kuartal operates across five interconnected business lines, each built to serve a different part of the intellectual and financial ecosystem we’re trying to build.

Kuartal Publishing

Books, handbooks, and long-form publications.

Kuartal Publishing produces the long-form intellectual work that underpins everything else we do — including the Kuartal Handbook Series, a collection of compact, rigorously argued books in the tradition of Oxford’s Very Short Introductions, designed to give readers a complete, lasting understanding of a single economic or financial topic in a few focused hours. This is where we invest in ideas that take longer than a news cycle to properly explain.

Kuartal Journals

Academic and applied research.

Kuartal Journals is our academic arm — a home for peer-informed research and applied economic scholarship on Indonesia and Southeast Asia. It exists to bridge the gap between university economics departments and the market-facing world, giving researchers a platform and giving practitioners access to rigor they don’t always find in daily financial media.

Kuartal Research

Market research and macro analysis.

Kuartal Research is our market-facing analytical desk — producing the macro strategy notes, sector deep-dives, and capital flow analysis that Kuartal Magazine is known for. This is the business line most directly modeled on institutional research: identifying the structural forces behind market-moving events, and explaining the winners, losers, and second-order effects for investors and policymakers alike.

Kuartal Impact

Impact investing and startup acceleration.

Kuartal Impact channels our research and network into early-stage capital — an accelerator and impact investing platform focused on backing founders building solutions to structural Indonesian and Southeast Asian problems. It reflects a belief that understanding an economy analytically is only half the job; the other half is participating in building it.

Kuartal Capital

Proprietary investment management.

Kuartal Capital manages Kuartal’s own capital across public equities, private equity, and venture positions. It is not open to outside investors — it exists to put the institution’s own analysis to work, aligning Kuartal’s incentives directly with the quality of the research and judgment produced across the rest of the business. When Kuartal publishes a thesis, Kuartal Capital is the line that has to live with being right or wrong about it.

Our Standard

Every business line at Kuartal is held to the same underlying discipline: explain the mechanism, not just the headline. Whether it’s a 150-page handbook, a peer-reviewed journal article, a macro research note, an early-stage investment thesis, or a position in Kuartal’s own portfolio, the test is the same — would this hold up to institutional scrutiny, and does it leave the reader with a genuinely better understanding of how the economy actually works?