Insights
Perspectives on Asian markets, consumer behaviour, research practice, commercial judgement and the responsible use of AI.
Digital Commerce
A named, disclosed-methodology survey puts creator-led commerce at up to $46 billion in Southeast Asian e-commerce sales — and also finds consumer trust declining across every creator tier even as the channel grows, a tension worth understanding before structuring a creator partnership.
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Consumer Intelligence
TAT's own April 2026 announcement made the arrival-count decline deliberate: Thailand is explicitly trading volume for value, targeting longer-staying, higher-spending visitors. A one-month data point in April 2026 shows the mechanism working exactly as designed — arrivals down 7%, revenue up almost 3%.
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AI and Decision Systems
A peer-reviewed study found something specific and useful: LLM accuracy in market research tasks decreases as question specificity increases — the opposite of where most reporting workflows most need reliability.
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Asia Market Signals
Philippine digital bank deposits grew 44% in 2025 and topped P150 billion by Q1 2026 — but the sector's non-performing loan ratio sits nearly double the industry average, and Forbes' 2026 customer rankings put two newer, non-fintech-native entrants ahead of Maya.
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Digital Commerce
Border-compliance time data cited from the World Bank's Logistics Performance Index shows an eight-fold gap between ASEAN's fastest and slowest land crossings — evidence that customs variability, not freight capacity, is the region's real cross-border constraint.
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Asia Market Signals
Vietnam's General Statistics Office data shows nationwide wages climbing steadily through Q4 2025, alongside a 7.2% minimum wage rise for 2026 — and manufacturing employment still growing, which complicates the simple 'costs are rising, move on' reading of the data.
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Research Practice
Published, comparable pricing data on offline and rural research recruitment in Southeast Asia is thinner than the industry's confidence on the topic would suggest — which is itself the more useful finding for a research buyer.
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Asia Market Signals
Indonesia's June 2026 EV incentive package ties the size of the subsidy directly to battery chemistry — and analysts are already asking whether the local-content rules behind it are strong enough to build a real industry rather than a cheaper import market.
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AI and Decision Systems
Deloitte's 2026 survey puts a number on the pilot-to-production gap in Singapore — and the wider region's own figures show adoption running well ahead of the world average while deployment maturity tells a more uneven story.
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Consumer Intelligence
Bain's 2026 consumer confidence research shows nearly 4 in 10 Southeast Asian consumers cut spending this year — yet Gen Z is redrawing the line between needs and wants rather than pulling back on engagement altogether.
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Research Practice
Benchmarks now put real numbers on a gap researchers have long felt informally: AI translation for Southeast Asian languages still lags well behind high-resource language pairs, and the shortfall is largest exactly where research synthesis needs precision.
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Asia Market Signals
Global chipmakers keep announcing Malaysia expansions. The useful question is which announcements build durable capability, and which the country's own talent numbers say it cannot yet fully staff.
Read insight →Asia Markets
Why regional opportunity must be balanced with country-level context—and how leaders can identify what should travel and what must adapt.
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Research creates value when findings clarify choices, challenge assumptions and guide action—not merely when a report is delivered.
Read insight →Practical AI
A practical view of how AI can improve exploration and synthesis without replacing accountability, context or experienced judgement.
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