The Growth Moved to Thailand and Malaysia

Ask most brands which Southeast Asian market they should enter and the answer comes back Indonesia, on the reasonable grounds that it is the largest. Largest and fastest growing are not the same thing, and this year they came apart noticeably.

The region’s eCommerce is on course for roughly 185 billion US dollars in gross merchandise value this year, with video commerce now about a quarter of it. That total hides very different trajectories from one market to the next.

Where the acceleration actually happened

Indonesia remains the biggest market in the region by some distance and will stay that way. Its growth rate this year, though, sat well below several of its neighbours. The sharpest acceleration we have seen has been in Thailand and Malaysia, both of which have run at rates that would have looked implausible eighteen months ago.

There are unglamorous reasons for it. Both markets have good logistics relative to their size. Both have high smartphone penetration and mature digital payments. Both are small enough that a mid-sized brand can achieve meaningful share rather than being one listing among a million. Indonesia offers scale, and with it a level of competition that punishes underfunded entries.

The argument for entering a market you can actually win

We have started framing the sequencing question differently with brands. Rather than asking which market is biggest, ask where the same budget buys a defensible position.

A brand with a modest regional budget spread across Indonesia will usually end up invisible. The same budget concentrated in Thailand can fund enough content, enough live selling and enough inventory to build something real, and the operating experience gained there makes the eventual Indonesian entry considerably cheaper.

What to check before committing

Three things settle it in our experience. Whether your category already has strong local competitors, since imported goods do not automatically win. Whether your price point survives local expectations without destroying margin. Whether you can service customers in the local language, because doing that badly damages more than the current quarter.

Growth rates are useful for deciding where to look. They are a poor reason on their own to commit. The markets that grew fastest this year did so because they were ready, and readiness is something a brand can assess directly rather than infer from a chart.