By: Logan Pierce – AsiaPresswire – The numbers tell one story and the streets tell another. In the first full year after the borders reopened, Thailand welcomed visitors in the tens of millions again, a figure that travels well in headlines and government press releases. Walk the strip near a Bangkok transit hub and the […]
Day: October 21, 2026
Saudi Arabia’s Building Boom Is Real — but the Skyline Lies About the Pace
By: Robert Sterling – AsiaPresswire – A single number explains why the world keeps mistaking Saudi Arabia’s construction market for a certainty. In one recent year the kingdom awarded construction and infrastructure contracts worth well over a hundred billion dollars, a sum larger than the entire annual building output of most countries in the region. […]
Vietnam’s Factory Dream Has Hit a Bottleneck — and It Isn’t Tariffs
By: Christian Brooks – SeaPRwire – A sourcing director I worked with spent the first half of last year moving part of his assembly line out of southern China. The arithmetic was convincing. Vietnamese factory wages sat around a third of what he paid in Dongguan. The workforce was young and large. A free trade […]
Why Companies Still Plant Their Regional HQ in Singapore — and What They Miss
By: Logan Pierce – SeaPRwire – A founder I know sat in a co-working space near Tanjong Pagar last spring, staring at a spreadsheet that would decide where his company’s regional headquarters would live for the next five years. His startup sold inventory software to mid-sized retailers across Asia. The spreadsheet had three columns: Singapore, […]
Hong Kong’s Family Office Bet: What the Numbers Say, and What They Don’t
By: Logan Pierce – AsiaPresswire – In May 2026, a Boston Consulting Group report carried a line that the city’s financial establishment had been working toward for three years: Hong Kong had overtaken Switzerland as the world’s largest cross-border wealth management centre. Cross-boundary wealth booked there rose 10.7 percent in 2025 to roughly USD 2.9 […]
Indonesia’s Nickel Downstreaming: What a Decade of Industrial Policy Actually Produced
By: Robert Sterling – AsiaPresswire – Indonesia banned the export of unprocessed nickel ore in January 2020, pulling forward a deadline that had originally been set for 2022. Five years on, it is the most consequential industrial policy experiment in Southeast Asia, and the clearest test anywhere of whether a commodity-producing country can force its way […]
The Compute Corridor – How a Malaysian Border Town Became Asia’s Fastest Data Centre Market
By: Christian Brooks – SeaPRwire – Johor Bahru spent most of its modern history as Singapore’s industrial periphery — a place where palm oil estates and light manufacturing absorbed overflow labour from across the strait without ever becoming anything like a destination. Commuters knew it as a traffic jam and a weekend shopping trip. Nobody […]
The Payout Problem Nobody Warned Us About: Getting Paid Across Southeast Asia’s QR Rails
By: Robert Sterling – SeaPRwire – A hotel in Cebu lost a booking last March because of a QR code. Not a broken one — a missing one. A guest from Singapore stood at the front desk with her banking app open, ready to pay, and there was nothing to scan. She paid in cash from […]