Let's go to do Businesses in Southeast Asia!

While China and India continue to grab the headlines, many of those businesses are seeing a rapid increase in profit levels from elsewhere in Asia – in many cases outstripping returns in China.

That's one of the findings of a new
report 'Rich pickings – opportunities in Southeast Asia's emerging
markets' produced by leading global credit insurer Atradius in
conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit. The report is based
on a survey of businesses, most of whom have their headquarters in
Europe and the US. 15% of respondents expected revenue growth of over
25% annually from their operations in Southeast Asia, almost double
the proportion of firms that boasted such rates during the previous
three years.
Another reason that businesses are
looking towards the second tier of emerging markets is the current
dearth of manufacturing capacity in India. A potent mix of Indian
bureaucracy, politics and scarcity of facilities means that
manufacturers are simply looking elsewhere to set up.
More than half of the businesses who
participated in the report noted that the potential of Southeast Asia
as a new end market was one of their main reasons for setting up
operations in these countries. The Atradius report shows that the
Southeast Asian economies that make up the ASEAN bloc are attracting
ever increasing interest from foreign firms looking to invest, sell
into, source from or find partners in the region.