Indonesia Conference Directory

This study aims to analyze the competitiveness of Indonesian cocoa and its several derivate products from 2006 to 2015 in two importing countries. Germany and The USA are chosen as the representative of the international markets because of three reasons. First, those two countries are the most prospective markets of cocoa products. Second, they consume large amount of cocoa processing products for their Industries. Third, as the core players of trade, they always import processed cocoa producs from Indonesia in the pastdecade. We use Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) approach to analyze the competitiveness of processed cocoa products, followed by Revealed Symmetric Comparative Advantage (RSCA) approach to avoid upward-biased problems from the previous steps. RSCA enables us to manipulate the RCA index to be symmetrical with interval values between -1 and +1 (Prasad, 2004). The results showed that in Germany, cocoa paste products and cocoa butter the two products that have high competitiveness, whereas cocoa powder was not competitive. In the USA, Indonesian cocoa butter was competitive while cocoa paste and cocoa powder were not competitive. Indonesia should focus on cocoa paste and cocoa butter to maintain their competitiveness through picing, contract negotiations, and trade relations.