Career
In his early career, Widjaja did various business, including trading cooking oil and agricultural products, coffee shop, pig rearing, bakery, and grave construction.[4][11][12] During Japanese occupation, price controls devastated his cooking oil business. When Indonesia's war for independence against the Dutch crushed his commodity-trading business in 1949, he sold family jewelry to repay creditors and traded in his car for a bicycle.
In the 1950s, when Indonesian military sent troops to Makassar to fight Andi Aziz in the Makassar Uprising and later Abdul Kahar Muzakkar in the Darul Islam Rebellion, Widjaja sold food and other supplies to the troops, forging ties between him and the military. He used the military ship to trade copra—the raw material to make coconut oil—from Manado to Makassar. And thus, his copra business started, later reaching Jakarta and Surabaya. However, the Permesta rebellion happened in Sulawesi and Widjaja decided to move to Surabaya.[12]
In 1962, CV Sinar Mas was first registered in Surabaya, and soon it opened a branch office in Jakarta. This company exported natural products and imported textiles.
In 1968, Widjaja opened a cooking oil factory PT Bitung Manado Oil in Manado, followed by PT Kunci Mas in Surabaya. The Manado-based factory later produced cooking oil under the brand Bimoli, which catered to up to 50 percent of the demand in the Indonesian cooking oil market. In 1990, Widjaja lost this brand to Salim Group after their joint ventures in cooking oil business split.[4]
In 1972, together with Taiwanese investors, Widjaja acquired caustic soda producer Tjiwi Kimia, which he transformed into the Sinar Mas Group's first pulp and paper manufacturer.[13] In the same year, he started Duta Pertiwi, a property developer and real estate business.[9] In the 1970s, he already acquired logging concessions.[8]
In 1980, Sinar Mas changed all its cooking oil refinery machines to be able to produce palm oil. In the same year, Widjaja already possessed extensive oil palm fields in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Papua. In 1982, he acquired a 10000 hectare field in North Sumatra.[14][15]
Also in 1982, Widjaja acquired Bank Internasional Indonesia (BII)[16] and founded PT Internas Artha Leasing Company.[15] BII became the second largest private bank in Indonesia,[17] but due to the 1997 Asian financial crisis, it failed in April 1998 with a debt of US$4.6 billion (the largest foreign debt owed by an Indonesian corporation at that time) and was nationalized in April 1999.[16] Widjaja moved back into banking by acquiring PT Bank Shinta Indonesia in 2005 and later renamed it as PT Bank Sinarmas.[18]
In 1990, Widjaja received an honorary doctorate from Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas, United States.[19]
By the mid-1990s, Widjaja's best-known asset was a controlling stake in Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), a Singapore-based company listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the 10th-largest paper company in the world.[2] After the 1997 Asian financial crisis and a dip in the international wood pulp price in 2000, it was revealed that the company had a global US$13.9 billion debt.[8] In March 2001, two months after being threatened with delisting from the NYSE, APP stopped paying its debt, considered to be the largest debt default in the world's emerging markets.[20][21] APP has also been convicted of being involved in illegal logging in Cambodia,[22] Yunnan Province, China,[23] destroying ancient rainforest
As of 2003, Widjaja lived primarily in Singapore and had turned over day-to-day control of his businesses to his extensive family.
