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.

169
Articles
ASEAN Tech
Primary beat
May 2026
Writing since
~1124 min
Total reading

Articles Showing 71–80 of 169

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 The decree defining it was expressly repealed, the circular carrying the province codes lapsed the same day, and the replacing law says only that it is a sequence of twelve natural digits.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
A smiling woman leaning out of a car window at a dealership, holding a set of keys, with a man in the passenger seat
Finance

Malaysia banned the Rule of 78, and the Rule of 78 was never the expensive part

On Bank Negara's own worked example the Rule of 78 costs an early settler at most about RM632 on a RM100,000 loan. Reading a 3% flat rate as cheaper than a 5% effective rate costs RM2,621 on the same loan — four times as much, and it does not require settling early. The reform's real value is the mandatory EIR quote.

4 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
An open spiral-bound week-to-view planner lying flat on a desk, every ruled line for every day left blank
Finance

Pichai Promised Gemini 3.5 Pro in June. Google Shipped Three Flash Models.

Alphabet entered September on its longest monthly losing streak since 2015. Flash is the small tier, and shipping three of them is not the flagship investors were told about.

4 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Rows of shipping containers in green, blue, red and orange stacked several high in a port yard against a clear blue sky
Finance

Dell's $95bn AI Backlog Exceeds Its $74bn Full-Year AI Guidance

Record revenue of $47bn and $60.9bn of AI orders against $16.4bn recognised. The order queue grew by about $44bn in three months, and full-year AI guidance is $74bn.

4 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A person silhouetted against a sunset over water, seated in front of several screens filled with candlestick charts and price panels
Finance

Broadcom's AI Revenue Tripled to $16.70bn. The Stock Fell on a 0.66 Per Cent Miss.

AI chips reached $16.70bn, up 221 per cent, and the shares dropped 4.4 per cent because next quarter's guide came in about $230m under a consensus of $35.03bn.

4 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Close view of a green printed circuit board showing a large black memory package, shielded inductors marked 220 and 4R7, and rows of surface-mounted components
Finance

Tencent Is 84 Per Cent of the Revenue in Enflame's 6.1 Billion Yuan IPO

Two oversubscription figures are circulating for the same STAR Market listing. They count different tranches, both measure a lottery, and the price says something else.

3 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
A dense overlapping spread of Indian one-hundred-rupee banknotes filling the frame, the Reserve Bank of India lettering and Gandhi portrait repeating across them.
Finance

The South Asian number ladder that no two countries share

Lakh and crore are usually presented as one regional system continuing upward into arab and kharab. Take the ladder to four finance ministries and India compounds, Nepal climbs, Pakistan jumps to billion, and Bangladesh does neither.

3 Sep 2026 · 8 min read
A white American county courthouse with columned entrance, flying the US and California state flags against a deep blue sky
Finance

Forty-Four State Attorneys General Say the CFTC Has No Business Here

Polymarket has raised US$300m while 44 state attorneys general fight the CFTC over jurisdiction. If an event contract is a derivative, state gambling law is pre-empted; if it is a bet, it is not.

1 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Hong Kong island and Victoria Harbour at dusk under a pink sky, the financial district lit up in the foreground
Finance

Shein's Growth Collapsed From 41.1 Per Cent to 1.1 Per Cent in Three Years

Shein raised US$1.7bn in Hong Kong and fell on its first day, at a valuation about a quarter of what private investors paid in 2022. Its revenue growth over that period ran 41.1, 20.7, 8 and 1.1 per cent.

1 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
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