Southeast Asia Is Six Markets, Not One

The phrase “expand into Southeast Asia” hides more work than it describes. Brands say it the way they might say expand into California. What they are actually proposing is six countries with different languages, currencies, payment habits, customs regimes and dominant platforms.

Treating them as one region is the most common and most expensive mistake we see.

Indonesia is the volume, and it behaves differently

Indonesia is the largest single market in the region by a wide margin, and it has been reshaped over the past year. TikTok’s purchase of a 75 percent stake in Tokopedia, completed on 31 January 2024, folded the country’s established marketplace into the platform that was already winning attention. Social discovery and marketplace fulfilment now sit inside one company.

For a brand, that changes the sequencing. Content is no longer something you produce after the listing goes live. It is often what makes the listing findable in the first place.

The other five do not follow Indonesia

Vietnam rewards livestream selling to a degree that surprises brands arriving from Europe. Thailand runs on chat commerce, and a conversation in LINE will close orders that a product page never would. Singapore is small, affluent, and useful mainly as a proving ground and a logistics hub. Malaysia sits between Singapore and Indonesia in both price sensitivity and platform mix. The Philippines has strong demand and the hardest last mile in the region.

Cash on delivery remains normal across several of these markets. Brands that assume card and wallet coverage matches Western norms tend to discover this after their first month of failed orders.

What travels and what does not

Product data travels. Brand positioning mostly travels. Pricing does not. Creative rarely does. Fulfilment promises absolutely do not, and a delivery window that is unremarkable in Singapore is a competitive advantage in the Philippines.

Our practical advice has settled into something unglamorous. Pick two markets. Get them genuinely working, including returns and customer service in the local language. Then add the third. Brands that open six at once usually end up running none of them properly, and the reporting gets bad enough that nobody can tell which one was actually working.