(Sourced from BCC Global Media / MoneyToday）
Original Article
The question global companies are asking about Asia is shifting. If the old question was “Should we enter the Asian market?”, the more pressing question now is “Are we prepared to compete in Asia, which has grown into the world’s largest industrial ecosystem?”
Winston Saehoon Kim, Head of Korea and Southeast Asia at BCC Global, diagnosed in a recent expert column for K.E.Y. PLATFORM—MoneyToday’s knowledge and learning content brand—that “the Asian industrial supercycle has already begun.” Asia, he argued, can no longer be described merely as the “factory of the world” or a low-cost production base; it is emerging as the central axis of a global industrial realignment in which electric vehicles, batteries, semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), renewable energy, and smart infrastructure are all growing at once.
Kim emphasized that Asia’s rise is not simply a matter of population size. Alongside India (population approx. 1.43 billion, GDP USD 4 trillion) and Indonesia (approx. 285 million, roughly USD 1.7 trillion), Vietnam has become a key hub for global manufacturing relocation, Thailand has established itself as Southeast Asia’s largest automobile production base, and Malaysia has positioned itself as a semiconductor and logistics hub. Combined, these markets exceed 2 billion people and USD 8 trillion in economic scale. Yet Kim characterized this as “the result of decades of industrial policy, institutional development, and long-term national strategy.”
His diagnosis is that the growth engine of the next decade is more likely to come from industrial investment than from consumption. Electric vehicles require batteries, and batteries require semiconductors and materials supply chains. Semiconductors are tied to advanced equipment, AI infrastructure, and a stable power grid, while renewable energy connects to energy storage systems and smart-city infrastructure. Rather than each industry growing in isolation, they interlock to form one massive ecosystem.
The numbers bear this out. In 2025 alone, China’s new energy vehicle (NEV) sales reached approximately 13.2 million units, growing at an average annual rate of 34% over the past five years. More than 60% of global electric vehicle sales take place in China, which also controls over 70% of battery cell production and more than 60% of the battery supply chain. In semiconductors, too, more than 75% of global production capacity is concentrated in Asia, which likewise sits at the center of the more than USD 4 trillion in annual global infrastructure investment.
To understand Asia’s supercycle, Kim noted, one must first look at China’s changing role. Where global companies once viewed China as a low-cost production base, it is now transforming into an innovation platform spanning AI, robotics, electric vehicles, semiconductors, and renewable energy. “China’s competitiveness no longer comes from cheap labor,” he said, “but from technological superiority, the speed of innovation, and a densely built supply chain,” assessing that the country is moving from “fast follower” to “innovation leader.”
This shift is reflected in corporate strategy. Only a few years ago, “China Exit” was the watchword; more recently, companies have gravitated toward the more realistic “China Plus One.” The approach keeps high-value-added production, research and development (R&D), and supply-chain integration in China while dispersing additional production capacity to Vietnam, India, Thailand, and Indonesia. “The future strategy is less a choice of ‘China or Southeast Asia,'” Kim explained, “and closer to ‘how do we use China and Southeast Asia together.'”
Understanding Southeast Asia also requires looking beyond the numbers to the networks. Kim pointed to the overseas Chinese economic sphere—the so-called “Bamboo Network”—that spans Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. The global overseas Chinese population is estimated at around 50 million, and they are assessed to own or manage more than 500 of Asia’s top 1,000 companies, with cumulative assets reaching USD 2.5 trillion. “In Southeast Asian business,” Kim said, “not only market size and cost structure but also trust, long-term relationships, and local partnerships become an important foundation of competitiveness.”
There are, of course, risk factors as well. Kim noted that U.S.–China strategic competition continues to affect supply chains and investment decisions, that countries are strengthening domestic-focused industrial policies, and that competition for top R&D talent is intensifying. Even so, he added, “periods of industrial paradigm shift have always been the periods when the greatest opportunities open up.”
On this point, he cited remarks by Professor Liu Qiao, Dean of the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University, delivered at the Global Alternative Investment Conference (GAIC), which Kim himself moderated. “The competition between the U.S. and China is not simply a trade war, but a competition over productivity and manufacturing competitiveness,” Liu said, diagnosing a shift “from an era of globalization in which countries grew together to an era in which each country first strengthens its own productivity and then cooperates.”
Ultimately, the companies that succeed in Asia share common traits. They build market trust from a long-term perspective rather than chasing short-term results; they transfer R&D and decision-making authority to local markets; and they form close partnerships with governments, industry, universities, and research institutions. They also strengthen local leadership that understands each region’s industrial structure, regulations, and consumer characteristics.
Kim argued that future competitiveness will not be determined by the scale of production facilities or labor costs. Innovation, localization, sustainability, strategic partnerships, and regional leadership are becoming the new sources of competitive advantage. “What determines the future is not ‘where you produce’ but ‘which ecosystem you are connected to,'” he said. “Asia is no longer a future opportunity—it is already the center of the global economy in progress, and it will become the arena where the outcome of industrial competition over the next decade is decided.”