Sarah Chew covers Southeast Asia’s technology, fintech, digital policy, and AI adoption landscape for RECATOOLS. Her work focuses on how regulation, platform shifts, and emerging technologies affect businesses, consumers, and digital markets across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

129
Articles
ASEAN Tech
Primary beat
May 2026
Writing since
~915 min
Total reading
All 129 ASEAN Tech 71 Finance 51 Business 4 AI & ML 3

Articles Showing 21–30 of 129

A rendered grey ballot box with red arrows converging on it — illustrating a platform built to steer voters towards a result.
ASEAN Tech

An Istanbul Firm Built a Voter-Targeting Platform for All 222 Malaysian Seats

Anthropic says the operators used census data, a thousand fake X accounts and a fake news site — and pitched Malaysia's communications regulator. The MCMC says that is not its business.

14 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Bundles of cable clipped in rows along a wall-mounted tray — illustrating the shared duct access that decides whether a new operator can build.
ASEAN Tech

Philippine Telcos Will Spend $2.2bn in the Year Their Moat Was Removed

A new law lets competitors build networks without an act of Congress. The three incumbents answered by committing $2.2bn to reach households first.

14 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
The Kuala Lumpur skyline at dusk, the Petronas Towers lit above the city
ASEAN Tech

Malaysia Ranks Second in ASEAN. The Index Is the Operators' Own.

The GSMA placed Malaysia behind Singapore on infrastructure, data governance, cybersecurity and AI policy. Three of those four pillars score policy, not outcomes.

13 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
A thick sheaf of loose papers fanned open on a pale surface
ASEAN Tech

ASEAN's Digital Agreement Is Worth $2 Trillion. Four Per Cent Have a Plan.

A survey of 184 firms found 35 per cent had not heard of DEFA and 49 per cent had heard of it and not looked at it. The respondents are the well-resourced ones.

12 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
The Shanghai skyline seen from above, with the towers of the Pudong financial district lining the river.
Finance

DeepSeek Hired Bankers. That Is Not the Same as Filing to List.

Four underwriters for a STAR Market float, a pre-IPO round near $74.5bn, and no prospectus. The reports do not agree on whether the listing lands this year or in 2027.

11 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
White round tablets spilling from a tipped-over pink pill bottle onto a pale surface.
Finance

Forus Raised Less Money at Three Times the Price, Four Months Later

A $150m Series C at $3bn follows a $160m Series B at about $1bn in May. The founders sold roughly five per cent instead of sixteen.

9 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A line of wind turbines silhouetted along a ridge against a pink and purple dusk sky.
Finance

Mistral Raised €3 Billion. The Gigawatt by 2030 Is Not Funded Yet.

Mistral's Series D is led by Samsung at a valuation above €21 billion, nearly double last year's. The money is for compute, and TCS committed about $7.4 billion for a comparable gigawatt campus this month.

9 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Several dark trading screens showing candlestick charts and order data in a dimly lit room.
Finance

Asian Chip Stocks Rallied on GPT-6 Astra. The Independent Index Scored It Flat.

MSCI Asia Pacific rose 1.3 per cent on compute-demand optimism. Artificial Analysis put Astra at 61, exactly its predecessor's score, at 2.5 times the token price.

8 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Chart on a dark navy field: a full-width orange bar labelled plus 52 per cent for August consolidated sales year on year, above a much shorter grey bar labelled 6.12 per cent, down from 6.15 per cent, for second-quarter gross margin.
Finance

Foxconn's August Sales Rose 52 Per Cent. Its Gross Margin Still Fell.

AI servers passed half of revenue for the first time and the margin slipped to 6.12 per cent. An assembler books the accelerator's whole value and keeps the assembly fee.

7 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
A hand holding a blank white plastic card with a magnetic stripe, bearing no name or number
ASEAN Tech

Vietnam deleted the rule that made its ID numbers decodable, and nobody stopped decoding them

Since 1 July 2024 no Vietnamese instrument says the 12-digit citizen ID has any internal structure. The decree defining it was expressly repealed, the circular carrying the province codes lapsed the same day, and the replacing law says only that it is a sequence of twelve natural digits. A provincial police portal was still teaching the old decode nine months later, citing the article that says nothing of the kind.

5 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
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