GoTo and MSCI: A Lesson in Market Liquidity

A company can report profits, grow revenue and improve margins while facing an entirely different problem in the capital market.

GoTo now provides a useful example.

At the end of July, PT GoTo Gojek Tokopedia Tbk reported Rp252 billion in profit for the period in Q2 2026. Net revenue increased 31% year on year to Rp5.653 trillion, while core GTV rose 83% to Rp164.331 trillion.[3]

Less than two weeks later came a headline that appeared to point in the opposite direction: MSCI would remove GoTo from the MSCI Indonesia Index at the end of August because of concerns about share liquidity.[1]

Are those two developments contradictory?

No.

That is precisely the business lesson.

Two stories can be true at the same time

Operating fundamentals and the quality of a company's stock market measure different things.

Financial results answer questions such as:

Is revenue growing?

Is the business profitable?

Are margins improving?

Are users and transactions expanding?

An index provider has additional questions.

Can the shares be bought and sold efficiently?

Can institutional investors build or unwind positions at meaningful scale?

Can free float be identified with confidence?

Can an index containing the stock actually be replicated?

In May, MSCI explicitly identified potential index-replicability issues involving GoTo because of very low liquidity after the shares had traded at Indonesia's minimum tradable price of Rp50 since 13 May. MSCI froze a number of index changes while it waited to reassess the stock during the August Index Review.[2]

Reuters reported on 12 August that the review ultimately resulted in GoTo's deletion from the MSCI Indonesia Index at month-end.[1]

That is a story about market liquidity.

It is not automatically a story about the company's ability to pay its obligations or generate cash.

Stock liquidity is not corporate liquidity

The word “liquidity” can easily create confusion.

Inside a company, liquidity normally describes the ability to meet near-term obligations through cash, current assets, working capital or financing capacity.

In a stock market, liquidity describes how readily a security can be traded in meaningful volume without excessive market friction.

They are not the same thing.

An illiquid stock does not automatically mean the underlying company is short of cash.

Likewise, a cash-rich company is not guaranteed to have highly liquid shares.

GoTo is useful precisely because improvement in one dimension can coexist with a problem in another.

The company reported positive profit for two consecutive quarters in Q1 and Q2 2026. Group adjusted EBITDA reached Rp1.010 trillion in Q2, up 137% year on year, while net revenue reached Rp5.653 trillion.[3] GoTo also maintained its full-year adjusted EBITDA guidance at Rp3.2–3.4 trillion.[3]

Those figures, however, do not answer MSCI's question about whether index investors can trade the security at the scale required.

Why indexes care about investability

An index is not simply a list of well-known companies or large market capitalisations.

The MSCI Indonesia Index is designed to represent the large- and mid-cap segments of the Indonesian market and approximately 85% of the country's equity universe.[6] Investment products and institutional portfolios may use such indexes as benchmarks or as portfolios to replicate.

A security therefore has to be more than large enough.

It has to be investable.

Consider an index-tracking fund.

When a company's index weight changes, the fund may need to buy or sell a substantial number of shares.

If trading volume is extremely limited, a theoretically straightforward portfolio adjustment can become difficult.

The transaction itself may move the market.

Or the required position may not be built within a practical timeframe or size.

For an index provider, this is not a minor technical inconvenience.

An index that cannot be replicated reasonably well becomes less useful to the investors that are supposed to track it.

Better fundamentals do not erase market-structure issues

This distinction needs careful editorial treatment.

Deletion from an index does not establish that GoTo's fundamentals have deteriorated.

Conversely, improved profitability does not prove that its stock-liquidity issue has disappeared.

GoTo told Reuters that MSCI's decision was technical, following from its shares trading at the Rp50 floor with low volumes, rather than a consequence of business performance. The company said it would remain in dialogue with MSCI.[1]

That distinction matters well beyond GoTo.

Management can make substantial progress in operating a public company while the capital-market architecture surrounding its shares has different performance requirements.

Investors assess earnings.

But institutional investors also assess:

free float;

market depth;

ownership structure;

governance;

information quality;

trading accessibility;

and whether they can exit a position when necessary.

A listed company therefore has two jobs:

operate the business effectively and remain investable as a security.

Indonesia faces a wider market question

The GoTo case also comes during a period of heightened scrutiny of the investability of Indonesia's broader equity market.

During 2026, MSCI reported concerns from international institutional investors over opacity in shareholder structures and suspected coordinated trading behaviour that could make it more difficult to assess true free float and rely on market prices for index construction and replication.[5]

Indonesia's regulators have responded.

OJK, the Indonesia Stock Exchange and KSEI implemented reforms covering disclosure of holdings above 1%, a High Shareholding Concentration framework, more granular investor classifications and a phased increase in minimum free float to 15% through amendments to IDX Regulation I-A.[4]

MSCI acknowledged those measures in its June Market Classification Review. It also stressed that global institutional investors need to see consistent implementation and sustained effectiveness in market accessibility and investability.[5]

Regulations can therefore be changed in months.

Market confidence generally needs evidence over a longer period.

Free float is more than a compliance number

Public-company management can view free float as a listing requirement.

Economically, it has a broader meaning.

When fewer shares are genuinely available for trading, the market has less capacity to absorb large orders.

But a free-float percentage on paper is not necessarily sufficient.

Investors also want confidence that shares classified as public float are genuinely available to independent investors and that ownership structures are sufficiently transparent.

That is why Indonesia's reform programme does not focus only on increasing the minimum free-float threshold to 15%.

OJK, IDX and KSEI have also enhanced disclosure of ownership above 1% and introduced High Shareholding Concentration reporting.[4]

For issuers, the strategic message is straightforward:

market access requires transparency, not merely a share count.

What public-company management can learn

The first lesson is to distinguish operating KPIs from capital-market KPIs.

Revenue growth matters.

Profitability matters.

Cash flow matters.

But a listed company also needs visibility into:

who owns its shares;

its effective free float;

turnover and trading depth;

institutional perceptions of accessibility;

and whether disclosure supports credible price discovery.

The second lesson is that investor relations should not be treated solely as a communications function.

IR sits at the intersection of corporate strategy, governance and market structure.

A strong IR function does more than explain quarterly earnings.

It understands how different pools of capital—including passive and benchmark-driven institutional investors—interact with the company's securities.

The third lesson is that an index is not a corporate award.

Index inclusion is not certification that a company is “good”.

Index deletion is not a ruling that a company is “bad”.

Indexes have methodologies and specific objectives.

Assessing a company only through its index status would be as simplistic as assessing it solely through one quarter's earnings.

The GoTo case shows why two lenses are necessary

GoTo currently presents these two realities unusually clearly.

On one side, the company has reported two consecutive profitable quarters alongside strong net-revenue and adjusted-EBITDA growth.[3]

On the other, MSCI identified trading-liquidity concerns significant enough to remove the security from its Indonesia index following review.[1][2]

Both can be true at the same time.

For business leaders, that is more useful than simply watching whether a stock enters or leaves an index.

A public company has to create value inside the business while also sustaining a market structure through which investors can access, assess and trade that value credibly.