About FHM Indonesia

FHM Indonesia

FHM Indonesia was the Indonesian edition of FHM, a title whose full name was given as For Him Magazine. It was a men's lifestyle magazine edition that was published in Jakarta, in the Indonesian language, and its print edition ran from 2003 to December 2017. As an edition, it formed part of a much larger international publishing story that began with the British master edition, and it also formed part of a distinct Indonesian publishing story that involved licensed foreign magazine brands, the MRA Media Group, and the changed conditions for magazine publishing that followed the end of the New Order era. Throughout its life, the edition retained the original FHM title while it presented its content in Indonesian, a combination that academic research later used to explain both its identity and its place in the market for men's magazines in Indonesia in the 2000s and 2010s.

Overview

FHM Indonesia was a licensed Indonesian edition of an established British men's lifestyle magazine. That basic description mattered because it defined how the title was produced, how it was understood by readers and researchers, and how it differed from a locally originated magazine. The edition was not presented as a translation issued from Britain. It was published locally in Jakarta by MRA Printed Media, part of the MRA Media Group, and it was written and produced for publication in Indonesia in the Indonesian language. At the same time, it carried the name, the brand identity, and the associations of FHM, a magazine that readers and researchers recognised as a Western magazine. That dual character, local publication under an international title, was central to the edition's history from its launch in 2003 until its print run ended in December 2017.

The edition's lifespan covered a period of fourteen years in print. During that time it belonged to two overlapping groups. Internationally, it belonged to the family of FHM editions that were published around the world each month. Domestically, it belonged to a group of licensed overseas men's lifestyle magazines that flourished in Indonesia after 1998, and, more broadly, to what academic research described as the new men's lifestyle magazines of 2000s Indonesia that were written exclusively for men. Those two affiliations explained much of its editorial positioning. The international affiliation supplied the brand and the model. The domestic affiliation placed it alongside titles such as Maxim Indonesia, Men's Health, Esquire, X-Men, Playboy Indonesia, and the local title Popular, in a competitive and culturally specific Indonesian magazine landscape.

Origin in the British FHM

The master edition from which FHM Indonesia derived was British. FHM was first issued in 1985, and it was published by Bauer Media Group. Over the decades that followed its first issue, the British title developed features that became closely associated with the FHM name in many countries. Among the best known of those features was the FHM 100 Sexiest Women in the World list. The list was cited in the verified record as an example of the kind of feature for which the master edition was known, and its reputation helped to explain why the FHM name carried recognisable value when editions were licensed in other markets, including Indonesia.

The history of the British print edition also provided an important contrast with the Indonesian edition. The British print edition ended in December 2015, after which the title continued in digital-only form. FHM Indonesia, by contrast, continued in print for two further years, until December 2017. That difference showed that international editions did not all end at the same moment or in the same way. An edition's print history depended on its local publisher and its local market conditions as well as on the history of the master title. In Indonesia, the decision and the circumstances that ended the print edition were bound up with the wider pattern of closures among the print titles of its publisher, MRA, during 2017.

Publisher and the MRA Media Group

FHM Indonesia was published by MRA Printed Media, which was part of the MRA Media Group, with MRA standing for Mugi Rekso Abadi. The group was founded by Soetikno Soedarjo and Adiguna Sutowo. Under MRA, FHM Indonesia sat within a portfolio of licensed international titles that the group built over two decades. The group's history in licensed magazine publishing began before FHM Indonesia existed. MRA launched Cosmopolitan Indonesia in August 1997, and that launch was recorded as the first licensed foreign magazine brand of its kind in 1990s Indonesia. That earlier launch established the model that later titles followed: an internationally recognised magazine brand, licensed for the Indonesian market, published locally, and presented to Indonesian readers.

The portfolio that MRA built around that model gave FHM Indonesia a set of stablemates whose histories later intersected with its own. Those stablemates included Esquire Indonesia, Maxim Indonesia, CosmoGirl Indonesia, and Autocar Indonesia. Although those titles served different readerships and different subject areas, they shared a publisher and a licensing approach. That shared background became especially visible at the end of their print lives, when many of MRA's print editions ceased within months of each other during 2017. The history of FHM Indonesia therefore could not be separated from the history of its publisher. Its launch belonged to the expansion of MRA's licensed portfolio, and its closure belonged to the contraction of that same portfolio in print.

Language, Place of Publication and Website

FHM Indonesia was published in Jakarta and it was published in the Indonesian language. Those two facts were simple, but they carried considerable significance for how the edition worked. Publication in Jakarta placed the edition within Indonesia's capital and within the centre of the country's magazine publishing industry. Publication in Indonesian made the licensed brand accessible as an Indonesian-language magazine rather than as an imported English-language publication. Academic research on Indonesian men's magazines noted this pattern across the licensed titles of the period. The magazines were published in Indonesian while they retained their original titles. FHM Indonesia followed that pattern exactly: the language changed to Indonesian, while the name FHM remained unchanged.

The edition also had a website, which was at fhm.co.id. The Indonesian country domain reflected the edition's national identity within the wider FHM network, just as the Jakarta publication base and the Indonesian language did. Together, the local publisher, the local place of publication, the local language, and the local web address marked FHM Indonesia as a distinct national edition rather than as a distribution copy of the British magazine. At the same time, the unchanged title and the reputation of the master edition preserved the international character that, as its own editor later explained to a researcher, defined how the magazine was perceived and how it sold its appeal to readers.

Print Run from 2003 to December 2017

The print edition of FHM Indonesia ran from 2003 to December 2017. That run gave the edition a long presence in Indonesian magazine publishing, across a period that began only a few years after the political and regulatory changes of the late 1990s had opened new space for licensed titles, and that ended during the cluster of MRA print closures in 2017. The dates also placed the edition's launch at the start of a recognised trend. Doctoral research on Indonesian masculinity and men's magazines recorded that the trend for licensed overseas men's lifestyle magazines in post-1998 Reform-era Indonesia started with FHM Indonesia and Maxim Indonesia. In that account, FHM Indonesia was not simply an early entrant. It was one of the two titles with which the trend itself began.

Because the edition lasted until December 2017, it outlasted the British print edition by two years. Its final month also aligned it with one of its closest stablemates. Esquire Indonesia, whose run was recorded as March 2007 to December 2017, ended in the same month. Maxim Indonesia ended earlier in the same year, in August 2017, while CosmoGirl Indonesia and Autocar Indonesia both issued their final print editions in October 2017. Within that sequence, FHM Indonesia was among the last of the group to end. December 2017 therefore served as both its individual closing date and as the closing point for the wider phase of MRA licensed print publishing that it had helped to begin in 2003.

Place in the FHM International Network

As of January 2007, FHM published 27 editions a month around the world, and Indonesia was among them. That figure gave a measure of the scale of the network to which FHM Indonesia belonged at a point well within its print run. Twenty-seven monthly editions meant that the Indonesian edition was one local expression of a format that was produced, under licence and through local publishers, across many national markets at the same time. Each edition retained the FHM title, yet each edition was rooted in its own publishing arrangements, language, and readership. For Indonesia, those roots were MRA Printed Media in Jakarta and publication in Indonesian.

Membership in that network also helped to explain the edition's recorded masthead connections. A November 2013 FHM international masthead listed Richard Sam Bera as FHM Indonesia's editor. The appearance of the Indonesian editor's name in an international masthead reflected the structure of the brand: national editions were identified individually within the collective presentation of the title worldwide. The network was therefore not an abstraction. It was documented in shared listings of editions and editors, and FHM Indonesia occupied a named place in that documentation during the latter part of its print life, four years before the edition ended.

The Reform-Era Context for Licensed Men's Magazines

Academic research placed FHM Indonesia in the publishing transformation that followed the end of the New Order era. A University of Western Australia doctoral thesis on Indonesian masculinity and men's magazines, written by Suzie Handajani, recorded that licensed overseas men's lifestyle magazines flourished in post-1998 Reform-era Indonesia after the restrictive New Order publication-permit era had ended. That permit system was known as SIUPP. In the thesis account, the end of that restrictive system changed what publishers could license and launch, and the flourishing of overseas men's lifestyle brands in Indonesian editions was one result of that change.

The same research gave FHM Indonesia a specific place in the chronology of that flourishing. The trend started with FHM Indonesia and Maxim Indonesia and was later joined by Men's Health and Esquire. That sequence mattered because it distinguished the pioneers of the licensed men's lifestyle wave from the titles that arrived once the wave was established. It also showed how MRA's earlier licensing experience, which began with Cosmopolitan Indonesia in August 1997, preceded and prepared the ground for a men's magazine trend that took shape after the regulatory environment had changed. FHM Indonesia stood at the junction of those two stories: the publisher's licensing history that dated from the 1990s, and the Reform-era expansion of men's lifestyle publishing that began in the 2000s.

Editorial Identity, Covers and Westernness

The most detailed recorded explanation of FHM Indonesia's editorial identity came from its own editor, Arvero Iwantra, in an interview conducted for Handajani's research. Iwantra explained that the edition was known as a Western magazine and that it sold that Westernness through covers that were dominated by Western celebrities. That explanation described a deliberate presentation. Westernness was not an incidental by-product of the licence. In the editor's account, it was the quality that the edition was known for and that it used, especially on its covers, to appeal to its market.

Iwantra also explained the practical reason that lay behind that cover strategy. He said that few Indonesian celebrities were willing to be photographed in alluring poses, and that those who were willing were mostly not top-tier, or class A, celebrities. That constraint shaped what the edition could place on its covers if it wished to combine an alluring presentation with the highest level of celebrity recognition. Western celebrities dominated the covers because, in the editor's account, they supplied both elements in a way that available Indonesian cover subjects generally did not. The interview therefore preserved a candid editorial rationale that connected the licence, the brand perception, the cover image, and the local celebrity culture in a single chain of reasoning. It also showed how a licensed edition adapted an international formula under local conditions, even while it emphasised, rather than concealed, its Western identity.

Editors Recorded in Research and Mastheads

Two editor names were preserved in the verified record for FHM Indonesia, and each name reached the record by a different route. Arvero Iwantra was identified as FHM Indonesia's editor in Handajani's doctoral research, where his interview explained the edition's cover strategy and its Western identity. Richard Sam Bera was listed as FHM Indonesia's editor in a November 2013 FHM international masthead. Taken together, those two records showed that the editorship of the Indonesian edition was documented both in academic fieldwork that drew on direct interview material and in the brand's own international listing of its editions.

The distinction between the two sources was itself informative. The academic source captured an editor speaking about editorial choices, constraints, and market positioning, and it therefore preserved reasoning that a masthead alone could not have supplied. The international masthead, by contrast, recorded formal attribution at a specific date, November 2013, within the collective structure of FHM's editions. Neither record was presented as a complete succession history of the editorship, and no such complete history was part of the verified facts. What the records established was narrower and more reliable: that Iwantra spoke for the edition as its editor in the context of scholarly research on Indonesian men's magazines, and that Sam Bera held the editor's listing for Indonesia in the November 2013 international masthead.

Place Among the New Men's Lifestyle Magazines

Handajani's research also situated FHM Indonesia among the new men's lifestyle magazines of 2000s Indonesia that were written exclusively for men. In that grouping, FHM Indonesia appeared alongside Maxim, X-Men, and Playboy Indonesia, and alongside the local title Popular. The grouping mixed licensed overseas brands with a local magazine, and that mixture captured the character of the market in which FHM Indonesia competed. Readers encountered international titles that had been adapted into Indonesian alongside a title that originated locally, all of them addressed to men as a defined readership and all of them shaped by the conditions of the same period.

To describe those magazines as new was to mark a change from what had come before. They belonged to the 2000s, to the period after the SIUPP permit era had ended, and to a publishing environment in which overseas men's lifestyle brands could be licensed, published in Indonesian, and sold under their original names. FHM Indonesia occupied a leading place in that development because its launch, together with that of Maxim Indonesia, started the licensed trend that the research described. Its classification among the new men's lifestyle magazines therefore reinforced its chronological importance. It was both a participant in the category and, with Maxim Indonesia, one of the titles through which the category first took form in Indonesia.

The 2017 Closures Across MRA and the End of the Edition

FHM Indonesia's print edition ended in December 2017, and it did not end alone. In 2017 many of MRA's print editions ceased within months of each other. Maxim Indonesia ended in August 2017, after a run that began in 2005. CosmoGirl Indonesia issued its final print edition in October 2017, and Autocar Indonesia issued its final print edition in the same month. Esquire Indonesia ended in December 2017, the same month as FHM Indonesia, after a run that had begun in March 2007. The closeness of those dates showed that the end of FHM Indonesia formed part of a publisher-wide contraction in print during a single year, rather than an isolated closure that affected one title in unrelated circumstances.

With that December 2017 ending, the print history that had begun in 2003 was closed. The edition left behind a documented record that spanned its British origin under Bauer Media Group, its publication in Jakarta in Indonesian by MRA Printed Media, its website at fhm.co.id, its place among 27 monthly FHM editions recorded in January 2007, and its pioneering role in the Reform-era licensing trend for men's magazines in Indonesia. It also left behind a scholarly record, in Handajani's thesis, that preserved how its editor understood its Western identity and its covers, and how researchers placed it among the new men's lifestyle magazines written exclusively for men. As a closed and defunct print edition, FHM Indonesia remained significant in that record as one of the two titles with which a major phase of Indonesian men's magazine publishing began, and as one of the MRA titles whose simultaneous ending in 2017 marked that phase's close.