ASEAN is One:
Business Threat or Marketing Opportunity?
At the government level, ASEAN countries have agreed with the ASEAN Community 2020. The ASEAN Community will lean on three pillars, ASEAN Security Community (ASC), ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), and ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC).
The recent ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in Vientiane that is attended by ASEAN countries plus its Dialogue Partners (Australia, Canada, the European Union, New Zealand, the Russian Federation, and the United States) also addressed this initiative towards integration, especially in security. China is even interested to cooperate with ASEAN to form ASEAN-China Free Trade Area. China and ASEAN have agreed to reduce duties on more than 7,000 products. Thus, the cooperation will create the largest free trade area in the world with total combined market of 1.9 billion populations. China also wants Indonesia as the most populous country in the region as its strategic partner.
The initiative at the government level will pose an impact at corporate business level. A progressively more unified ASEAN will bring greater business challenge to the local players in ASEAN countries. However, this business challenge also harbors tremendous marketing opportunity.
Observe how multinational corporations also eye the ASEAN market. Take the automotive industry; large corporations have started building regional production base for ASEAN market. Toyota built a production base in Indonesia for its Kijang Innova and Avanza, whereas sedans and pick-up trucks are assembled in Thailand. These cars are then distributed to countries in the ASEAN region. Honda followed suit, it assembles the CR-V sports utility vehicle (SUV), Stream MPV and Jazz compact car in Indonesia for export to other ASEAN countries.
The increasingly dynamic and tangible ASEAN as a regional production base and one single market convinced me that regionalization is becoming more important than globalization.
Globalization is a done deal for multinational corporations. It is now time for regionalization. It is time for them to focus towards a specific region such as ASEAN. They have to become regional multinationals focusing on ASEAN. For local, ASEAN-based companies seeking to expand, globalization is too abstract a concept for them, the Asia-Pacific market is too distant. ASEAN is the real market for them. ***
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