"Southeast Asia should be well-placed to thrive in a more geopolitically complex world. The region is rich in natural resources, has a young and increasingly wealthy population, and maintains economic and trade links with major economic powers like the U.S., China, India and the Gulf Cooperation Council. Yet during the Fortune Innovation Forum in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday, Asia Partners co-founder Nicholas Nash challenged Southeast Asian entrepreneurs to be much more ambitious in their aims."
""We're not thinking big enough," he said, in response to a question about how talent is moving around the reason. "If Southeast Asian talent can be attached to companies that can scale beyond 40, 50 or 100 billion [dollars' worth] of market cap, they will stay." The only way to get to that level, Nash argued, was consolidation. "Not one of our countries in ASEAN is big enough to produce a multi-billion dollar company," he said."
Southeast Asia possesses abundant natural resources, a young and increasingly wealthy population, and strong trade links with major global economies. Regional entrepreneurs are urged to pursue far greater scale so talent remains attached to firms capable of reaching tens or hundreds of billions in market value. Consolidation across markets is presented as the primary path to creating such large companies because individual ASEAN countries are generally too small to produce multi-billion dollar firms. The region has relatively few Global 500 firms and its largest company, DBS, is valued far below leading Asian corporations. Longstanding participation in semiconductor supply chains dates back to Intel's 1972 plant in Penang.
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