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 · Finance Showing 1–10 of 51

Rows of gold and silver chains hanging on display in a jewellery shop
Finance

The 916 on a gold chain means something different in Malaysia and Singapore

Malaysian regulations make the fineness stamp compulsory, fix 22 karat as 916 rather than 917, and force the receipt to separate metal from workmanship. Singapore requires neither stamp nor assay, and its precious-metals statute never mentions purity at all.

19 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
The colonnaded stone facade of a classical Singapore building, a Singapore flag flying at the left and flowering shrubs below
Finance

A Singapore credit report can come back with no score at all

Credit Bureau Singapore grades borrowers AA to HH — but five other grades carry no score, and two of them are adverse findings rather than a blank slate. An unsettled default is displayed indefinitely, and the thirty per cent utilisation rule imported from American advice does not exist here.

19 Sep 2026 · 8 min read
Thai twenty-baht banknotes overlapping, the top note showing its denomination in Thai numerals
Finance

Thailand's VAT rate is legally 10%, and the 7% expires every year

The Revenue Code sets Thai VAT at 10% and always has. The 7% everyone pays lives in a royal decree with an expiry date — the current one runs to 30 September 2027 — and the story that the 1997 crisis caused the cut has it backwards.

18 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Two call-centre workers in headsets at a shared wooden desk, one typing at a monitor
Finance

Philippine 13th month pay is a wage, and a Christmas bonus can count as it

Thirteenth month pay has been compulsory in the Philippines since 1975, but a December bonus worth at least a twelfth of basic salary satisfies the obligation — the rules define it as an equivalent. The ₱90,000 tax exemption is also shared with those other bonuses, not reserved for the thirteenth month.

18 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
A long supermarket receipt lying across packets and tins of groceries.
Finance

Singapore's core inflation leaves out a third of the price index

MAS Core Inflation drops accommodation and private transport, which together carry 35.6% of the 2024-based CPI. Most of that accommodation weight is rent that home owners never pay, which is MAS's argument for leaving it out — and the gap between the two measures has run in both directions.

17 Sep 2026 · 5 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
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