Just a year before COVID-19 took a toll on the global financial markets, private equity firm Asia Partners predicted that Southeast Asia will be home to at least 20 more tech unicorns by 2029. In its 2019 Internet Report, the private equity firm also said Southeast Asia would have at least 10 more billion-dollar tech companies that will pursue IPOs over the next decade.
Fast forward to 2022, despite the global health pandemic, recession, and an ongoing war, the predictions were ahead of target — Southeast Asia now has 52 unicorns and the region has seen seven tech IPOs at a valuation of $1 billion or higher.
Notably, last year, which was considered a tough year for IPOs, two Southeast Asian tech unicorns managed to go public — Indonesian tech giant GoTo and e-commerce firm Blibli.
“All it will take is for three more companies to go public in the next six years and we’ll be at our target for 10 more, but we think it will actually be more than that,” Oliver Rippel, co-founder and partner of the Singapore-based PE firm, said at the launch of the 2023 Southeast Asia Internet Report.
The overall IPO fundraising in the region, however, was lower in the first 11 months of 2022 compared with the whole of 2021. According to accounting and advisory services firm Deloitte, funds raised across 136 IPOs in Southeast 52% lower at $6.3 billion compared with a record $13.3 billion raised from 152 IPOs in 2021.
Asia Partners is confident of hitting its IPO target over the next 10 years. However, Rippel said the still underdeveloped equity research ecosystem in the region is worrying — Singapore has only 63 equity research analysts to cover newly public companies, while Hong Kong has 305.
“It’s something to consider, and we hope that the investment banks will find a way to make this a priority,” he added.
Asia Partners, however, fell short in its forecast that new and existing tech companies in the region will create an additional $400 billion of market cap in tech by 2029.
Four years on, the region is behind schedule on this one, Rippel said, hitting just 15% of the target instead of 40%.
The prediction was based on Southeast Asia’s total tech market cap as a percentage of GDP in 2019, which was just 2.2%. China back then was 16.6%. Asia Partners felt the region would be there at 16-17% by 2029, which meant an additional $426 billion of equity value.
‘With six years still to go, we’re still cautiously optimistic that we’ll hit and perhaps even exceed the target for 2029,” Rippel added.
Regional strategy remains key
Asia Partners continues to be on target when it comes to predicting that 70% of the winners will be regional platforms and 30% will be Indonesia-focused platforms.
Rippel said it is now possible to build regional companies, especially in tech, but stressed that it is not easy and players need to follow a very specific playbook on how to do it.
There are two core strategies that Asia Partners sees for Southeast Asia. The first strategy is to just focus on Indonesia, and the second one is to go regionally, with Singapore as a hub.
“In Southeast Asia, Singapore has long been the region’s hub. What’s quite impressive is that, quietly, Singapore has also become Asia’s hub. If you look on LinkedIn for people with Asia Pacific, Asia, or APAC in their job title, 25% of those people globally are based in Singapore,” he said.
Rippel said a third strategy is being considered, although it may still be a little early — a single country Vietnam, Thailand, or the Philippines.
Series C/D gap with China widens after a brief breather
The Series C and D funding gap with China briefly closed in 2021-2022, when everything in the world was over-supplied with capital. However, the dramatic pullback in capital supply brings the Series C/D gap back as a prominent feature, according to the report.
Funding between $20 million and $100 million is the typical size of Series C and Series D rounds. Also called growth capital, it is crucial for companies looking to scale and reach the next level of their business.
The report did not quantify the seed ecosystem in Southeast Asia, which it said is active. Moving up the ladder to Series A and B, however, shows a very robust expansion in capital supply in recent years.
From 2015-2022, the Series A and B community made over 1,300 investments, with over 900 done in just the past four years. In the $20-100 million size range, the gap becomes evident.
“What that tells you is that for most of the past decade, there was a gap with China of about 3.6 basis points. That may not seem like much but multiply it by $3 trillion of GDP in Southeast Asia, and it adds up,” Rippel said.
Growing number of founders
The report also noted that there are now more than 3,000 or so founders and CEOs that first-generation companies have recycled back into the ecosystem. In 2019, Asia Partners identified companies whose alumni produced 1,197 founders in the region.
“One of the things we’ve started tracking is how many alumni of the top 55 or so universities in China are now working in Southeast Asia’s tech industry. Just based on LinkedIn profiles, it’s at least 13,000 people,” Rippel added.
To take a step back, it has been over a decade since the first generation of Internet companies in Southeast Asia were founded in a remarkably productive four-year period from 2009-2012, which saw the founding of Sea, Grab, Lazada, Zalora, Gojek, Tokopedia, Bukalapak, and Traveloka, according to the report.
“When talent did come from the tech industry, it often came from a much earlier generation of tech: for example, over 400 of Sea’s employees come from IBM or Accenture; almost 350 from Singtel or Telkom Indonesia; and over 100 from the semiconductor industry,” said Pitra Harun, co-founder and Indonesia head of Asia Partners.
Most SE Asian countries outperform US markets
Another point highlighted in the report was the performance of the Southeast Asian markets, especially during the pandemic years.
The year 2022 was very challenging for the public equities market, with stock markets globally suffering losses.big However, five out of the six major economies of Southeast Asia managed to outperform the US markets last year in dollar terms.
Thailand’s index grew 2%, while Singapore was flat, which, according to the report, was a real accomplishment in a year like 2022. Indonesia dropped only 4% in dollar terms, while the index for mid- and large-cap US stocks was down 21%.
Vietnam, however, was among the world’s worst performing markets last year, co-founder and managing partner of Asia Partners Nick Nash said.
He also pointed out that three of the six economies in Southeast Asia had real GDP growth higher than inflation in 2022, while almost all of the rest of the world fell into the red zone.
Asia Partners, launched by Nash and Rippel, former CEO at Naspers’ B2C e-commerce division, announced the final close of its inaugural private equity (PE) fund at $384 million in March 2021.
The fund — Asia Partners I — is the largest debut technology fund focused specifically on Southeast Asia. The vehicle makes investments starting from $20 million across Southeast Asian tech startups.
Nash, who left Sea Ltd in December 2018, earlier justified the move to launch a growth fund by saying that Southeast Asia had the potential to create over $400 billion of new technology sector equity value over the next decade.
The 2023 Southeast Asia Internet report by Asia Partners can be downloaded here.