JAKARTA: A tax amnesty could boost industrywide car sales in Indonesia by a fifth, as people spend their newly declared wealth on big-ticket items, the local unit of Honda Motor Co said. “The car ownership ratio in Indonesia is relatively low and there’s enough room for producers to sell more,” Jonfis Fandy, head of sales and marketing at PT Honda Prospect Motor, said in an interview on Friday last week at the Gaikindo Indonesia International Motor Show. “If the tax amnesty program proves to be a success, we could see an increase of as much as 20 percent next year,” he said. The central bank estimates the reprieve, which runs through March, could lure as much as 560 trillion rupiah (US$43 billion) of undeclared income back to the country from overseas. With a population of 256 million, Indonesia is Honda’s third-biggest overseas market after the US and China.
