India's Southeast Asia Expansion Wave: What Early Movers Are Learning

CXO India Insights has conducted in-depth interviews with the CFOs, CEOs, and board members of fourteen Indian companies that have established substantive operations in Southeast Asian markets over the past three years. The picture that emerges is nuanced: the market opportunity is real, but the execution complexity is consistently underestimated. The most common early mistake is treating Southeast Asia as a single market. Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines are as different from each other in regulatory environment, consumer behaviour, talent availability, and business culture as any four European countries. Companies that enter with a single product-market approach and a standardised operating model almost invariably find themselves re-platforming within twelve to eighteen months. The companies that succeed tend to enter one market with genuine depth before scaling laterally — resisting the pressure to spread too thin in the name of regional ambition. The talent challenge deserves particular emphasis. Finding senior managers who combine deep local market knowledge with the ability to operate effectively within an Indian parent company's culture and management system is genuinely difficult. The most successful Indian companies in Southeast Asia have solved this by investing heavily in the integration of local and Indian management teams — not simply deploying Indian expats with local hires in supporting roles, but building genuinely hybrid leadership teams where local expertise is valued and visible. This takes longer and costs more than the expat-led model, but the retention and performance data across our cohort strongly favours it.