Asian foreign direct outflows to hit US$400b by 2020

Find out four challenges Singapore and neighbors must face to reach this record.

Ernst&Young revealed that the importance of Asia to global trade will continue to increase steadily over the next decade with foreign direct outflows reaching US$400b by 2020 for nine rapid-growth markets within East and Southeast Asia.

Here's more from Ernst&Young:

The nine rapid-growth markets covered by the report are Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Mainland China. The impact of the foreign direct outflows trend will be momentous, creating new spheres of competition, a new generation of global companies, and changing patterns of trade flows both within and outside the region.

While Asian companies are on a high growth trajectory, they also face a host of dilemmas. The survey identified four key challenges:

1. moving up the value chain could erode the critical advantage of low cost;

2. the nuances of local markets are difficult to understand or control;

3. top management teams often lack an international outlook and

4. expanding internationally requires shoring up of infrastructure and capabilities.

This is according to a new Ernst & Young report, Beyond Asia: strategies to support the quest for growth, which surveyed over 600 business executives from organizations based in East and Southeast Asia.

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia