We Are Back for the Final Stretch of 2026, and Our Plans for 2027

To the Kuartal Community,

Every year-end letter I write starts with the same instinct: to resist the temptation to make the year sound tidier than it was. 2026 was not a year of a single, linear narrative. It was a year in which Kuartal grew outward — into sport, into media and film, into venture capital, and into the formal structures needed to support the work our editorial team has always cared about. Some of these moves will look, in hindsight, like an unusual set of bets for a publication that started as a macro and markets outlet. I want to use this letter to explain why we made them, what they have in common, and where we’re headed in 2027.

The most personal decision of the year was divesting from AFC Mataram City to found Nusa Mataram. That is not a small distinction. It would have been easier to stay a minority partner in an existing club than to build a new one from the ground up. But Kuartal has always believed that ownership — real, structural ownership — is what allows an institution to build for decades rather than quarters, and a football club is as good a test of that philosophy as anything else in our portfolio. We are now working to raise $2.5 million to fund the club’s academy and core infrastructure, with a further $5 million raise planned to build a permanent stadium ground. This is patient capital by design: we are not building Nusa Mataram to flip it, we are building it to be a fixture of the region for a generation.

Alongside this, we acquired Nusa Sports & Entertainment Group, which now serves as the holding structure for our sports and entertainment investments — Nusa Mataram, Argapura Sportswear, Lumbung Academy, and additional companies we will announce through 2027. The logic here mirrors the logic of Kuartal Capital more broadly: rather than treating each investment as a standalone bet, we want a portfolio of businesses that reinforce one another — a club that develops talent, an academy that trains it, and a sportswear company that outfits it, all under one strategic roof.

On the venture side, we took a minority stake in RINJANI SELECTS, our clearest statement yet that Kuartal Impact is not just a research and grantmaking function but an active investor in early-stage founders. The 2026 cohort — TENGGARA, BARUJARI, SCNDBRU, and SASKA — represents the kind of founder we want to be associated with: builders working on real problems, not just pitch decks optimized for the next funding round. We formalized this commitment further by establishing Kuartal Publishing and Kuartal Impact as dedicated subsidiaries this year, giving both functions the structure and accountability they need to operate at the scale we want them to reach in 2027 and beyond.

Perhaps the least expected move of the year was our majority acquisition of RUKRE Media Group, which will anchor our work in webcomics, animated series, and live-action film and television. This is a genuine expansion beyond our traditional editorial footprint, and I want to be direct about the reasoning: distribution of ideas matters as much as the quality of the ideas themselves, and story-driven media reaches audiences and shapes culture in ways that long-form journalism and research alone cannot. Alongside this acquisition, we announced the acquisition of hosting rights to the Rinjani International Film Festival — a platform we intend to use to bring Southeast Asian storytelling to a larger stage, and to give RUKRE’s slate a natural home to premiere and be discovered.

We also took a position in Ascarya.id, a housing and real estate development company, this year. It is a smaller announcement than some of the others in this letter, but not a smaller conviction. Housing sits at the intersection of nearly every theme Kuartal covers: household wealth formation, urbanization, infrastructure, and the basic question of whether economic growth translates into a better standard of living for the people experiencing it. We see Ascarya.id as a long-term bet on Indonesia’s continued urbanization and on the idea that good, well-planned development is itself a form of impact — one that belongs naturally alongside the community and entrepreneurship work we do through Kuartal Impact.

Finally, on the Kuartal Capital side, we rebalanced our own portfolio through the year, increasing our positions in Amazon (+9%), Apple (+8%), Allstate (+8%), Dominion Energy (+7.8%), Astra International (+3%), Bank Rakyat Indonesia (+5%), HM Sampoerna (+4.2%), Bank Mandiri (+7%), PepsiCo (+6.21%), CSX (+5%), Union Pacific (+5%), and NextEra Energy (+10%). This reflects a deliberate posture: a mix of durable global compounders, Indonesian financial and consumer bellwethers, and infrastructure and energy names we believe are well positioned as capital continues to reprice around the energy transition and logistics realignment. As always, Kuartal Capital manages our own capital, not outside investors’ — which means every position on this list is one we are prepared to live with, for better or worse, as our own conviction.

I know this is a wider array of activity than the Kuartal Community may have expected from a publication. But every one of these moves shares the same underlying belief that has always defined Kuartal: that understanding an economy, a market, or a community properly is only half the job. The other half is participating in building it — with the same rigor, patience, and willingness to be judged by outcomes that we ask of the research and journalism we publish every day.

In 2027, our priorities are straightforward to state, if not simple to execute. We will complete the capital raises for Nusa Mataram’s academy and stadium ground. We will announce the additional companies joining Nusa Sports & Entertainment Group. We will support the 2026 RINJANI SELECTS cohort through their next stage of growth, and open our next cohort. We will bring RUKRE Media Group’s first slate of projects to production, and host the first Rinjani International Film Festival under Kuartal’s stewardship. And we will continue to grow Kuartal Publishing and Kuartal Impact into the institutions their mandates deserve.

None of this happens without the Kuartal Community — our readers, our members, our partners, and our backers — who have trusted us to build with the same seriousness we ask of the subjects we cover. Thank you for a formative year. I look forward to building the next one with you.

With gratitude and ambition,

Diemas Sukma Hawkins
Founder & CEO, Kuartal