A growing number of Indian companies are establishing meaningful operations in Southeast Asian markets. The lessons from those who went first are worth the attention of boards considering the move.
What the Research Covers
CXO India Insights conducted in-depth interviews with the CFOs, CEOs, and board members of fourteen Indian companies that have built substantive operations in Southeast Asian markets over the past three years. The picture is nuanced: the market opportunity is real, but companies consistently underestimate the complexity of execution.
Southeast Asia Is Not One Market
The most common early mistake is treating Southeast Asia as a single market. Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines differ from one another in regulatory environment, consumer behaviour, talent availability, and business culture as much as any four European countries do.
Companies that enter with a single product-market approach and a standardised operating model almost always end up re-platforming within twelve to eighteen months. Those that succeed take a different route:
- They enter one market with genuine depth before scaling laterally.
- They resist the pressure to spread too thin in the name of regional ambition.
The Talent Challenge
The talent question 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 addressed this by investing heavily in the integration of local and Indian management teams. Rather than deploying Indian expats with local hires in supporting roles, they build 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.
