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Raymond Cheng highlights the recent resumption of the Yen downtrend against the USD after intervention, and discusses outlook on the currency pair and Japan equities.Speaker:- Raymond Cheng, Chief Investment Officer, North Asia, Standard Chartered Bank For more of our latest market insights, visit Market views on-the-go or subscribe to Standard Chartered Wealth Insights on YouTube.

We’re excited to have Will Loux, senior vice president of global economic affairs for the U.S. Dairy Export Council, join us to share his presentation of the future of U.S. dairy exports. For years, the U.S. dairy export portfolio has leaned heavily on nonfat dry milk, skim milk powder, lactose and lower-protein whey products. But our exports are changing. In the latest episode of The Milk Check, host Ted Jacoby sits down with Will Loux to break down the changing U.S. export picture. In this episode, we cover: Why U.S. dairy exports are moving toward cheese, fats and higher-value proteins How domestic protein demand is pulling skim solids away from dryers Why more cheese may be produced partly to create additional whey protein How exports are absorbing a larger share of new U.S. cheese production Where Latin America offers room for additional cheese growth What it will take for U.S. butter exports to become more consistent and profitable The U.S. has the milk. It has new processing capacity. And it is capturing a growing share of international cheese demand. But growth creates new challenges. Are you ready to meet them? Listen to The Milk Check episode 104: Can the U.S. Keep Its Dairy Export Advantage? Also available on: Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Got questions? We'd love to hear them. Submit below, and we might answer it on the show. Ask The Milk Check Transcript: Ted Jacoby III: [00:00:00] Coming up on the Milk Check. Will Loux: What I’ve heard from folks in Europe and elsewhere is how do they manage the U.S. tsunami of exports that’s coming? And I think that, at the Export Council, it makes me excited, but it does mean we need to keep our strategies current. Ted Jacoby III: Welcome to the Milk Check from T.C. Jacoby & Co., your complete guide to dairy markets, from the milking parlor to the supermarket shelf. I’m Ted Jacoby. Let’s dive in. Ted Jacoby III: Today, we are very excited to have Will Loux, Senior Vice President of Global Economic Affairs for the U.S. Dairy Export Council joining us.  A few weeks ago I saw a presentation that Will gave that talked about where the U.S. dairy industry is going, especially from an international perspective. It was an absolutely fantastic presentation, and I couldn’t help but think that just this presentation alone would be an absolutely fantastic topic for our podcast.  I have a bunch of our traders joining us, many of our usual suspects, including: Ted Jacoby III: Diego Carvallo, Joe Maixner, Miguel Aragon, Mike Brown, all from our trading team. Guys, thanks for joining us. Will, thank you so much for joining us. It’s great to see you again. Will Loux: Good to see you, Ted. Thanks for having me on. Ted Jacoby III: Excited to have all of our listeners listen to this. Will, the floor is yours. Will Loux: Perfect. Well, thank you for having me, Ted, and glad to have so many people on here and another audience for this presentation. I’ve got some slides. For those of you like me who will listen to this podcast usually while driving, feel free to go check it out on YouTube. I am also gonna do my best to reference what is in those slides as best I can remember to do so. But what is the future of U.S. dairy exports? What we’ve seen, really over the last twenty-five years, has been this tremendous, consistent growth, in aggregate U.S. dairy exports. We just got May data, and what we saw was on an annualized basis over the last twelve months, the U.S. actually set a new record again. So our exports have never been higher than they are today. But that said, our exports look fundamentally different than what they did 20 years ago. Before, when we were getting started with exports, 75, 80% of our exports were really driven by nonfat dry milk, and low-protein whey products, and lactose. That’s been the vast majority of our portfolio for much of this time, and we’ve had a few different eras where we’ve seen U.S. cheese exports picked up, especially around 2014 when the world was short of milk and we saw U.S. cheese and butter go overseas. But then we saw that stagnate for a few years. Now, what we’ve seen since COVID has been this tremendous growth of these more value-add products, these specialty products. I believe the U.S. is moving towards a portfolio in the export market that looks a lot like cheese, fats, and proteins. And that’s gonna be the core of our exports, I think, going forward because the U.S. dairy industry is really kind of, I consider it an evolution rather than, like, a true revolution. But this is one of those facets that I think is really interesting to see is the U.S. has consistently been growing its exports, unlike a [00:03:00] lot of other supply origins. But this is one that I think as we go forward I’m really excited about. But it’s gonna change how we need to think about exports over the next few years. Ted Jacoby III: Will, it sounds like what you’re saying is not only are we seeing the total volume of exports go up, but the dollar per pound value is even going up faster because we’re switching away from that low-cost carb portfolio to a much higher-value protein, fat, et cetera portfolio. Fair to say? Will Loux: I think that’s exactly right. I think there are implications for that, too.  That if the U.S. is moving out of perhaps exporting as much skim milk powder or sweet whey because we’re instead making UF milk or cottage cheese or yogurt or high-protein whey, well, there’s still demand overseas for that sweet whey and for that skim milk powder. But now, it’s actually getting supplied by a few other countries, too. So, we do have to keep all of these things in mind. But to me, I think we’re moving up the value chain as the U.S., and what I’ve heard from folks in Europe and elsewhere is how do they manage the U.S. tsunami of exports that’s coming? And I think that, at the Export Council, it makes me excited, but it does mean we need to keep our strategies current with where we’re gonna go in the future. One of the things that I’ve noticed here over the last really few months but even going back to last year has been a real shift in how the U.S. dairy market is balancing itself. I would argue that for the last really 20 years, to be frank, but at least for the last 15 years, the U.S. dairy market has largely been balanced to domestic fat demand. Yes, we did see, certainly, exports of cheese grow over this time, so I don’t want to discount that as a butterfat-heavy product, but for the most part, what we’ve seen has been the U.S. has consistently balanced with where domestic demand for butterfat has grown, and then we’ve exported the skim solids largely in the form of nonfat dry milk and sweet whey overseas. What we’ve seen here over the last several years has been the U.S. switching from a traditionally balancing to domestic milkfat demand, where we’ve seen butter consumption grow, whole milk consumption grow. U.S. milk production, U.S. dairy production grew with that. And then, we exported the additional skim solids in the form of nonfat dry milk, sweet whey, high protein whey, lactose. Those products were the ones that we were really exporting. Now, what I think is happening is the U.S. is no longer really balancing to fat anymore. We’re in this precarious balance right now. We’re not quite balanced to protein yet, and we’re not quite balanced to the beef market yet because we still have high prices for protein. We don’t have enough of it to go around. We don’t have enough beef for the beef market to go around, but we also have more milk fat than the domestic market can consume. And so we’ve seen these exports really rise. So, I think what we’re seeing right now is the U.S. being pulled in different directions, and the U.S. exports as we go forward here over the next few years is in some ways at a crossroad as to which of these routes do we go. Do we swing back to balancing to milk fat, which would mean we’re probably short of protein, or do we start balancing more to protein, which means we’re gonna need to find homes for a heck of a lot more cheese and butter in the next few years. [00:06:00] Because to me, at least, if you look at the beef market, from a dairy farmer’s perspective, you are still seeing that incentive to add additional cows just based on the returns on the beef side of things. And because of that incentive to hold the dairy cows longer to get the additional black calf, also with that breeding the best of the best in the young stock, we are just seeing the largest milking herd since the 1990s and the lowest replacement herd since the 1970s. And everything we’re seeing on the beef cattle side of things would suggest this isn’t slowing down anytime soon. But from the U.S. perspective, I think what this means is we’re gonna continue to see more milking cows around, and those cows are getting more productive than ever before. And even as we’re seeing this surge in milk production, I think on a component basis, last year in in 2025 we were up 3.8%. This year we’re up not quite at 3%, but still pretty darn close. Even as we see this growth of milk, these additional black calves coming on the market, we actually still don’t see enough protein hitting the dairy markets right now. And so, what we’re seeing is even as we see this huge surge in cottage cheese production and yogurt production, my personal opinion is yogurt doesn’t get enough credit for this protein rally. It’s like 10X the volume of cottage cheese, but what we’re seeing right now is this pull of protein. I think this pull of protein is predominantly domestic. We’re seeing UF beverages, we’re seeing yogurts, we’re seeing cottage cheese, we’re seeing everything that whey protein can go into from cereals to snacks to beverages. All of that protein pull is basically sucking protein and skim solids that had been going to the export market back into the U.S. By virtue of that, we’re also seeing U.S. cheese production need to increase, not so much for the cheese demand that we’re seeing here in the United States, but rather for the whey demand that we’re seeing here as well. The cheese has really become that co-product of the whey stream. I think even conversations that I’ve had with U.S. manufacturers of, “How can I get more whey protein without building a new cheese plant” is part of the consideration. One of the things that we’ve looked at over this time has really been where is this protein in the United States going? Because we’ve seen U.S. milk production rise, U.S. milk protein production rise in the sense of protein out of the cow, but we still have less nonfat dry milk and skim milk powder than we had a year ago. What I’ve noticed over this time has been certainly the cheese vat continues to get first dibs on most of that protein. Even in the May data that we got out of USDA, you saw cheese production was up, even when nonfat dry milk was sitting at sky-high levels north of $2.00. What we’re really seeing right now is we’re pulling milk out of the dryers and either putting it into the cheese vat or putting it into these other high-protein products and the like. What that is doing is that’s shifting our export mix. So far this year, our exports of skim milk powder, amazingly, are flat somehow. But if [00:09:00] you look at our May exports of nonfat dry milk and skim milk powder, they were down 20%, and I think that’s reflective of that, and we were down last year. What we’re seeing has been the U.S. is moving out of some of these carb-heavy, as you talked about, Ted, to these more higher value uses for these products. And even nonfat dry milk production picked up in May, but it’s not that we pulled milk out of the yogurts or out of the cottage cheese or out of the natural cheese itself, it’s that we stopped making skim milk powder and instead made nonfat dry milk. This is really where we’re seeing this pull of protein, either in the form of beef necessitating more cows or necessitating more capacity to make whey proteins, milk proteins, UF products, or just high-protein dairy products. All of that pulled together is sending a, “Let’s go make more milk.” Contrasting that, you have cheese and fats, which at this point right now, and historically this isn’t too unusual, but it is something different than we’ve really seen over the last few years, has been this export push of cheese and dairy fats in the form of predominantly butter, AMF, and to a lesser extent whole milk powder. What we’re seeing here has really been this shift where right now I think we’re growing our milk production as fast as the international market can absorb our cheese and fats. Because if you look here, since COVID, what we’ve seen is about 36%, over a third of the new cheese that’s been manufactured in the United States, has gone to export. If you think about that historically, about 5% of the new cheese in the previous decade went to exports. And now we’re at 35%. And if you look at the last two years, it’s north of 65% has gone to exports. As we’re building these new cheese plants, in part for the whey, there is that eye towards, “Okay, where are we going with this cheese?” And it’s gotta be overseas. Within that, too, the United States is actually the one capturing what is a growing global market. It’s not just that the U.S. is flooding the market with less expensive cheese, it’s that global cheese demand is growing, and the U.S. is the one capturing that. Because if you look, since COVID, the U.S. has captured about 60% of that new cheese demand that’s happening overseas, and that’s really been coming from the United States. Europe’s grown their cheese exports too, so has New Zealand. Australia’s basically flat, but the rest of the world evens up. The difference here is that the United States is really the one capturing this demand growth because we have the milk, we have the cheese, and that’s really where I think the U.S. has managed to expand its footprint, be a more consistent exporter, and really break into new markets that it hasn’t before. But we’ve been in cheese for a while. Granted, it’s at a different scale today than what it has been. We were up 20% last year in cheese exports. This year we’re up about 25% so far this year. We continue to surge in our cheese exports. The difference that is new this time around is, fundamentally, that we’re seeing this expansion come not [00:12:00] just in cheese as our primary vehicle to export the fat and casein, but also in fat-heavy products, predominantly butter, but also AMF and whole milk powder, too. That you’re seeing the United States now, for every, load of high-protein beverages, you’re gonna have a load of cream that you’re gonna need to deal with, or multiple loads of cream that you’re gonna have to deal with, and that’s now going overseas. Domestic demand for butter is still going strong. Domestic demand for whole milk continues to grow. The difference is we’ve just grown production faster than that domestic demand. And so, you pull this all together, and I really think we’re seeing an evolution in our portfolio for exports. Cheese by value is now our biggest export product, and you’ve seen fats and proteins continue to grow within that portfolio, as well, from a value perspective. While we’ve seen nonfat dry milk, low protein whey, lactose, those have really been flat to declining over this timeframe. And so, if you look at that incremental growth that we’ve seen in our U.S. dairy exports since COVID, again, what we’ve seen is our two biggest stars during this period have been cheese and fats, and I think protein in the long run is still really optimistic to me. But you pull this all together, the U.S. is still gonna be a major player in skim milk powder, sweet whey, whey permeate, lactose. But if you look at where our exports are gonna grow in the future, those are really some of the key products. What do you all think about this as kind of a argument here for where our U.S. dairy exports are going? Joe Maixner: That’s been exactly what we’ve been discussing for the past six plus months, that our supply is going to continue to outpace the domestic demand. So 100% agree with everything you said in this, Will. I think that butter will continue to become a major player in the export market. Miguel Aragón: In my case, being out there in the trenches, I see this day in, day out. The penetration of U.S. cheese and butter, especially right now. We know the soaring ingredients, but cheese and butter especially, every day you could see it more and more in the marketplace. Something really interesting that you said at the beginning: If we’re gonna produce more cheese, we’re gonna have to find a place for it. We know the numbers, we see the numbers. It’s an amazing story. But right now, as we speak, that is replicating in Central America. You guys see it at the U.S. DEC. And I just came back from Colombia. The opportunity is there for us, as long as we keep doing what we’re doing now and looking at the market, adapting to the market, adapting to what the market is asking us for, and also replacing some of the product that is coming from Europe and New Zealand. But I agree with what you’re saying here 100%. Ted Jacoby III: Will, I’m gonna turn the question around on you a little bit. Is the global demand for butterfat there for us to continue to increase how much butter we’re exporting? And is the global demand for cheese there? Will that global demand keep increasing for those two products? Will Loux: From my perspective, it’s yes. What I find interesting over the last couple years has been that [00:15:00] cheese demand held up exceptionally well even during high inflation periods. Where we saw other dairy products actually feel a lot of the pressure internationally, cheese demand kept growing pretty much right on track. What we’ve seen here on the cheese side over the last couple of years internationally has been this acceleration in cheese demand, and I think some of that has to do with, as Miguel was saying, tremendous growth from our partners in Latin America. That’s been a key engine for U.S. dairy exports here over the last couple of years and, frankly, since the Export Council was founded about 30 years ago. But when we look at the opportunities abroad, I think that we still have a lot of untapped potential on the cheese side. I remain pretty optimistic about that. The other thing I’ll say, too, here is: I don’t think European milk production’s gonna keep growing at 3% a year. I don’t think you’re seeing the same investment in new cheese capacity. I think we’re seeing investment in Europe and New Zealand in new protein capacity, and that’s maybe another conversation. But I think the U.S., one, has the opportunity to capture what is a growing global market on the cheese side, and also capture market share on the cheese side. The butter standpoint has been interesting. Butter has typically been, internationally, one of the more price-elastic products. It’s one that we’ve seen when butter prices really skyrocketed, some of that may be allocation, but when butter prices were high, we did see international demand struggle. Conversely, when butter prices were low, like they are today in many ways, we’ve seen butter demand grow. And butter demand internationally is growing, not just out of the U.S., but globally. I think the question I have here with butter is less about can the U.S. compete in this market, but more, what is our price point relative to Europe and New Zealand. Because I think if you look at our butter exports, for much of last year we were probably a buck a pound below Europe. A lot of that butter was going into Europe, where coincidentally the tariff into Europe is about a buck a pound. I think my question is more crucially than can the U.S. capture growing demand for butter, it’s where do we grow our butter exports. And I, personally, think the U.S. should never be exporting really butter to Europe unless we get additional market access. I think the U.S. should be exporting butter to its higher value markets and partners, places like Mexico, like Central America, North Asia and Korea, Australia, the Middle East, assuming we can keep the strait open for a little while. But I still remain pretty optimistic that the U.S. can keep growing in those products. Some of it will be market share, and some of it will be new demand, particularly on the cheese side. Ted Jacoby III: Will, looking at this graph where it’s talking about, U.S. dairy exports by destination, there’s a big increase into Latin America since 2021. Will Loux: Yep. Ted Jacoby III: Is that fair to say most of that is cheese? Will Loux: It’s fair to say most of it is cheese. We have seen increases also in nonfat dry milk and skim milk powder exports to Latin America over this timeframe, too, but the big driver, I think especially post-COVID in Latin America, was, [00:18:00] one, that region was the first major region, I should say, where tourism increased to levels higher than what it was before COVID, and we continue to see pretty good economic performance in the region. The other thing I don’t wanna discount here, too, has also been the full implementation of CAFTA-DR, our trade agreement with many of the Central American countries came into full effect, and you’ve seen this real surge in demand from the region and collaboration with our local partners there, that we’ve really seen this growth in Central American demand and Caribbean demand. Most of that is cheese. More recently, there are also butter and AMF and so going there too, but cheese has been the engine on the Latin American side most recently. Mike Brown: Will, I’ve got a question. Anything in particular we in the dairy industry, and of course you at U.S. DEC, are watching as far as improving opportunities, but also possible disadvantages we may gain through trade. Will Loux: Yeah. Great question, Mike. I have a mix of optimism, and then probably a couple notes of caution on this. So from my optimistic take, a lot of these new agreements on reciprocal trade that we’ve signed with key partners around the world, some of these are incredibly exciting because these are markets we’ve wanted to have agreements with for a long time. In particular, Indonesia makes me very excited. I think if we are able to see that actually be implemented here soon, I would be even more excited. I think there’s still a question on when that gets fully implemented. Taiwan is another one. We are getting access into markets that we never had access to before. We’ll see when those are fully implemented but again, I am still pretty optimistic on where those have opportunities for the U.S. to build upon and get on an equal footing with our competitors in Oceania and in Europe. However, our competitors are not staying static. We see a new agreement here between the European Union and Mexico. We have an agreement between the European Union and Mercosur that gets them additional access, particularly in proteins. I think the U.S. cannot take its customers for granted. Especially as we look at places like Mexico, that’s one where competition is not going to go away. And when we’ve seen nonfat dry milk sit 75 cents plus above Europe, you’re gonna see customers start calling Europe and New Zealand and looking for alternative sources. Or when we have high-protein whey products that are in such demand domestically, are we making sure we’re contacting our customers abroad? Because what we’re seeing now is Europe is heavily investing in additional whey protein capacity. Even as the U.S. is the largest exporter of high-protein whey in the world, I think there are other origins that are coming for that. And so, when I look optimistically, it’s like, “Great, we get more market access.” But to some of the key questions that I have around like is the U.S. ready for the future of dairy exports, one of them is gonna be: How do we actually meet this international demand on the protein side, and are we gonna have the market access that we need to be able [00:21:00] to capture sales? As I look at the world market today, I have a ton of optimism for where the U.S. can really be the supplier of choice, but it’s not gonna be a straight line from here to there, even on the fats or even on the cheese. I think the last couple years, milk production’s been up so much, it’s allowed us to capture a lot of demand, but even those I think will bounce around. Mike, I don’t know if that answered your question, but that was where my head’s at these days. Ted Jacoby III: Everybody, we will be right back after these messages. Diego Carvallo: I’m Diego Carballo with T.C. Jacoby & Co.. T.C. Jacoby & Co. specializes in international dairy markets. For new customers that haven’t done business with Jacoby, I would tell them that we can provide them with many of the powders, dairy products that they consume, not only with the physical product, but we can also help them mitigate their risk. We know dairy. We know the main players. We know the main providers for the whole value chain. We are one of the strongest players in the U.S. market because we have contact all the way from the farmer moving the liquid milk all the way to the end users that buy the end products. I am Diego Carballo with T.C. Jacoby & Co., and we bring dairy to the world. Will Loux: Ted, maybe what do you think if we go through a couple of these questions and have a little debate? Ted Jacoby III: All right. We’ll ask our team. Number one, does the U.S. have the necessary market access and global reach to capture sales opportunities in a multipolar world? Will Loux: And maybe I’ll clarify what I mean by multi-polar world. Ted Jacoby III: Great idea. Will Loux: Cause what I mean by that is if you look at global dairy trade leading up to COVID especially, from 2010 to 2020, China was the engine of that global dairy import demand growth. They accounted for 40% of that growth. These days, I’m not particularly optimistic China’s gonna be the engine. I think China will be an important import market, for sure. And I think they’re still gonna need fats, they’re still gonna need proteins, but they’re growing their own domestic supply, particularly of commodities. So, what I think the future looks like from a demand perspective is collective growth. Latin America, Southeast Asia, Middle East, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa even, I think there will be a lot of countries growing that collectively equal what China was doing before. But we’re gonna have to play in a lot of markets. So, the question to you guys then is: Do we have the reach and access to be able to compete in a lot of different places, or what does that look like for the U.S.? Because China is not gonna be the engine of global dairy demand here over the next decade, we’re gonna have to compete in a lot of different markets. In the previous decade leading up to COVID, you saw a lot of the New Zealand milk production, an increasing percentage was going to China, which opened up opportunities for us in Southeast Asia and the Middle East and others.  As we look at this next era of dairy exports, do we have the market access? Do we have the global reach and infrastructure to be able to capture sales in a lot of different markets [00:24:00] around the world? Diego Carvallo: That’s a good question. If we start with the premise that the U.S. is not gonna desperately need to export nonfat, I would say that it’s not gonna be that difficult to find new markets. The U.S. is not gonna have to fight to move additional volumes like they need to do for products like butter. Where do we take the skim milk powder that we’re currently making if China is not a huge buyer anymore? There’s plenty of demand still to be covered in other regions of Southeast Asia in other regions in Latin America, where we should have a good footprint and where we should have some advantages when it comes to freight. I would say the main markets where we have to gain market share are gonna be definitely Central America, the Caribbean and Latin America because of all of the advantages when it comes to freight and the relationship and other factors. The market where we’re gonna fight with the rest of the origins is gonna be Southeast Asia, we may need to go there and fight with price, with aggressive pricing, and we may need to compete even with China, ’cause we’re hearing that even China has been exporting product to that region in the past year. There’s gonna be some markets where we are positioned to gain market share and others where we’re gonna have to compete in price. Ted Jacoby III: Miguel, what do you think? With cheese and butter, do we have the necessary market access and global reach? Miguel Aragón: We do have the necessary market access. Our products are welcome where we are taking them. Our issue is more like, the cheeses that we produce at scale, cheddar and color cheddar, are not necessarily the cheeses that our markets are asking for. We need Gouda, we need Monterey Jack, we need Sadero, we need Manchego. We need the help of our partners, our plant partners, to adapt and to see the opportunity of the cheeses that those markets ask for. And I’m in particular about Latin America. But then again, that’s a big market.  U.S. cheeses are well-received. We do have places to go with it. We just have to get better at exporting. U.S. DEC does a really good job at helping us get into those markets, vet the customers and teach about the products. We are doing the right things. We just need to do it a little bit better. We do have places to go with that extra cheese. Ted Jacoby III: Miguel, do you think there’s a lot of underserved regions in Central and South America? In other words, are there a lot of customers who the only reason they’re not buying and importing more U.S. cheese is because they don’t know who to buy it from, they don’t have the contacts? Miguel Aragón: I do. In the last trips that I made, especially to the northern part of South America, colombia, Peru, Ecuador, there is demand. It just reminds me of Mexico 15, 20 years ago. They don’t know who to buy it from. They don’t know that we make it. They don’t know that we have the variety that we have. It’s an education. We have to work, harder at marketing our products down there. But there is a place. There is definitely a place. There is a market. Ted Jacoby III: Thanks, Miguel. All right, Joe, I got a question for you. Can the U.S. export butterfat products consistently and in a [00:27:00] profitable manner? Joe Maixner: I think we’ve started showing that we can export consistently. Numbers have been pretty consistent and have been growing throughout the year. A profitable portion probably remains to be seen. We’ll always have to be aggressive as we’re entering into new markets ‘ cause we’re gonna have to find a way to penetrate into markets that have been historically dominated by Europe or Oceania with a product that does not look like Europe or Oceania’s product. The easiest way to do that, obviously, is to, for lack of a better term, buy our way into the market to people to try the product. But once our product is in there and they realize it’s a consistent quality butter, I think that we certainly have the opportunity to be profitable long-term. Realistically, exporting butterfat consistently makes everybody more profitable in the U.S. because it pushes fat offshore, which helps our butter price, ultimately, domestically. Will Loux: When I look at exporting butterfat profitably, for us, especially at the Export Council, it’s been one of those things that the U.S. for the longest time hasn’t had butter basically to export. When we’ve gotten long, we’ve found places to clear it. I think what’s changed this time around has been that it seems like with the pull of protein, that we’re gonna have at least some butter available long-term. The question that I still have is where are the best places for us to invest? And even as an Export Council, where are the best places for us to invest our resources into trying to make sure that customers even know that the U.S. has butter available to export, while also trying to find ways of helping U.S. exporters navigate different tariffs than they’ve traditionally had to export, making sure the product specs meet it, and then also trying to get new market access in places that, for a while we’ve seen a lot of trade agreements that thankfully got the U.S. access in cheese and in milk powders, and sometimes butter was in there, sometimes it wasn’t. And so how do we get additional access into that? I look at the U.S.-Japan phase one, that we got additional cheese access, I think we could use some additional butter access into Japan. I’m pretty optimistic on this one. I don’t know if we’re there yet, but I think it’s gonna be isolating which markets are going to be the most profitable for us. I’m probably less optimistic that we’re gonna be consistent in exporting butter here in the next couple of years. But long-term, I think it’s undeniable that the U.S. is gonna have to go in this direction eventually. Ted Jacoby III: Why are you less optimistic in the short-term? Will Loux: I’m a little optimistic in the short-term because we have been exporting effectively double the butter exports we have been. We’ve seen that gap between the U.S. and international markets close quite a bit. Inventories are pretty low. The milk fat test, until May, which surprised me a little bit, had been slowing down as farmers adjusted rations. If we get to the point where butter is $1.40, $1.50, I’m not sure it always makes sense for the farmers to pay for the incremental increase in feed inputs to boost the butterfat test to the [00:30:00] extent that would boost our exports. We may find ourselves tighter in butter in the fourth quarter because we’ve exported our way back to balance. And to me, it looks like where cheese was 15 years ago: That we are on the path towards being a consistent exporter, but we’re often still going to prioritize our domestic market. From the U.S. perspective, I think our butter looks like cheese did 15 years ago, where we’re often export competitive, but not always. Joe Maixner: Will, basically, you have summed up exactly what I’ve been saying for a while, where the butter export opportunity will be cyclical because we will get super competitive, which will drive our domestic price up, which will take us out of the market, and then in turn, cause a surplus of domestic butter to show up in the market, which will then collapse the price and make us super competitive again in the export market. We’re still early enough in the phase that we’re trying to figure out those cycles. I do think it’s cyclical. Overall, though, I do think we will be a consistent exporter. There’ll be a base, and it will ebb and flow, but I do think we will be a consistent exporter moving forward because as we’ve gained market share, we are getting loyal end-use customers in export markets that will consistently pay for our product. Will Loux: I 100% agree with that. I think it’s gonna be, where do we keep our consistent customers, and where are the opportunistic sales that maybe ebb and flow? That’s gonna be a multi-year process as that all shakes out as to where are our stickiest markets within all this? Mike Brown: You want those consistent customers. Jacoby, one of our jobs is helping people with those opportunities. So, they’re both important, but you still need that core base demand and respect for the product. And so, I have a question for you on this, Will. Let’s take butter. Butter’s a great example because the world is unsalted 82, we’re salted 80. I think Joe would attest: We’re seeing suppliers trying to be more flexible in making the product that meets that demand, yet on the other hand, if you’re gonna store a commodity, you gotta make the commodity that is the market product. What are you seeing as far as our adaptability to be that flexible supplier in the world market? What else do we need to do that maybe we aren’t currently doing? Will Loux: There certainly has been a lot of progress made. From my perspective, you have a few different things. One is, of course, the salted and the fat content in the U.S. is different. It’s rare that we’re gonna be exporting from our inventories of 80 salted unless it’s just purely a price play. But what I think about when I think long-term export opportunities is really targeting the key channels that the U.S. is likely to win in first. And some of that’s food manufacturing. I think that’s where the U.S. can be really good, especially making bulk butter for export. I think it’s the first channel. But then it’s also making sure our formats meet the expectations of the customers. Because food manufacturing, I think, will only get us so far. The next phase where the U.S. can really excel in a couple markets is in the foodservice space and in the bakery space, in particular. We have next to no [00:33:00] capacity in the U.S. to make butter sheets, basically the stuff that you would use for croissants or bakery applications. Those are things we know we’ve heard from customers on how we can make products that are specifically geared towards that. In the long run, those are some of the issues. Some of it’s also from an Export Council perspective, educating customers on why U.S. butter is a different color, helping them understand how to utilize it. And even if they choose to use 80%, how to adjust their formulations to that to help understand, “Hey, this is a simple difference of 2% fat difference.” We can work in that space here, too. Long term, I think the U.S. needs to be sure, and this is something we’ve seen in all the other export products that we’ve seen over the years, is not solely trying to sell what we make here in the U.S. and say, “Hey, you should try this instead.” But instead figuring out what our customers are asking for and really making that product. And a lot of that goes down to also the formats and trying to move beyond just bulk butter for further processing into really targeted markets with those specific products. Ted Jacoby III: Joe, do you think the butter industry will invest in those things to increase our capabilities to deliver what the customer wants? Joe Maixner: I think eventually they may have to if our fat components continue the direction that they’re going. Some of the forward thinkers will be the first to adapt, and they’ll be the beneficiaries of investing in some further processing type manufacturing to be able to account for that. Cause at the end of the day, the profit’s in the value add. It’s not in selling bulk.  If there’s production capacity, and there’s space to do the addition, and somebody has the foresight to take the chance on it, I think that the payoff is there. Because if you get into that food service type packaging or laminated butter sheets or you get into a product that nobody else is making, that makes you very sticky in that market. You own that market. Will Loux: Even as we’re talking about butter here, we’ve got to think of other, fat-heavy products that could actually play really well in the international market. I tend to think whether it’s, like a UHT cream product, I know there’s always interest in like a frozen cream product. That’s a hard thing for the U.S. to make in some ways. I think UHT creams, we continue to see grow even as we see UHT milk itself actually decline globally. But we’re seeing real interest in that food service sector of, “Hey, let’s get whipping creams that are really targeted towards some of these international markets.” As much as for the U.S. it’s geared around, “Okay, what’s the most storable form of fat?” I think that’s step one, to find a way to export it. But step two is really what are these value-add fat-containing products that we can actually be targeting and competing in as well. And then I think balancing to like an AMF or a whole milk powder, but then using our butter and creams for the value add opportunities. Ted Jacoby III: I agree. Joe Maixner: Let’s not forget cream cheese, either. Cream cheese internationally has been phenomenal. That has plenty of trajectory to keep going. Miguel Aragón: I [00:36:00] must agree 100% with what Joe was saying on cream cheese. We are seeing phenomenal requests for cream cheese throughout Latin America, now in Asia. As what you were saying about channels, Will, we are now working with retailers in Central America with butter. Right now, it’s food service packaging going into retailers, but I think that’s a very interesting thing happening because once those brands of U.S. manufacturers start showing up in the retailers, I think we’re gonna have a better pool of U.S. butter. Ted Jacoby III: I agree, Miguel. Will, I think we should move on to the next couple of questions.  – I’m gonna read them both out because I think they’re very related. The first question is, can the U.S. grow cheese exports fast enough to keep up with whey protein demand. And then the second question is, will the U.S. have the protein to supply both the rising domestic and international consumption? I’ll answer the Second question first, which is, my dad, one of the things he drove into us as traders was, at the end of the day, everything’s a matter of price. Which means supply and demand will be regulated by what the price of protein is in the global market. I think it’s fair to say Europe has a much greater ability to add whey protein processing than the U.S. does because a smaller percentage of the whey offtake from cheese plants in Europe is currently being processed into whey protein. So, we will see some pushback there. But in the end of the day, that’s simply gonna self-regulate over what that global price is. My prediction is, can the U.S. grow cheese exports fast enough to keep up with that whey protein demand? I think we are reaching a point where the U.S. is consistently priced where the world market is priced for cheese, and I think that is going to change the way new cheese plants get built because we have had pushback for for 40 years. It’s exactly what Miguel has been talking about, is you don’t make the cheese that we want. Well, if we’re consistently now priced properly into the international market, my challenge for the cheese industry is someone needs to build a plant that supplies the international market with what they want, because we’ve arrived at the point where we’re gonna be consistently competitive now, and that risk becomes worth it. Miguel, do you agree? Miguel Aragón: Totally. I couldn’t have said it better. The market is there; it’s waiting for us to take more of it, but we need the right product now. Ted Jacoby III: And I think that whey protein demand may actually drive someone to do it.  What do you think? Will Loux: I agree with everything you’re saying. I think these are two inextricably linked pieces. Right now the signals are such: “Make more whey protein capacity” is clear. There’s also an element of “make more MPC capacity” or “make more capacity with the skim stream targeting proteins” as well. I think what’s holding back some of this capacity to date is probably much more the profitability on the cheese and on the fat side, and where those prices are at. From the dairy farmer perspective of if they’re investing is, the dairy farmer getting the price signals on the protein side? Because right now they’re getting the [00:39:00] price signals on the cheese side and on the fat side, and those are saying not as much to grow. These all need to be put into the spectrum of like, if we successfully grow our cheese exports and keep that international price relatively firm and grow demand abroad for cheese, and grow demand abroad for fats, it’s clear to me the protein demand seems pretty much insatiable here in the U.S. I think there’s a ton of untapped demand internationally, especially as GLP-1s start launching internationally. Like, there is a lot of international demand that I don’t think the U.S. should lose sight of, particularly with regards to whey proteins and milk proteins and all these other products. But it comes down to: can we grow our exports of cheese and butter, not just where we’re setting the global price for those products, but finding ways to make that stream profitable internationally, just as we’ve made the protein stream now incredibly profitable from a whey protein perspective. Folks are gonna come, particularly in Europe, as you said, I think they’re manufacturing over a million metric tons right now of sweet whey in Europe. Some of that’s gonna go to high-protein whey products. We’re gonna have more competition in that space. We’ll see what the price ends up being. All of these things are inextricably linked. And when I think about the mandate here at the Export Council, it’s like, how do we grow those cheese, those fat, and those protein exports, to keep that profitably moving and continue that investment? Because demand’s there for protein, and we’re seeing good demand internationally for cheese. We’re moving the fat overseas. But how do we do that in the most valuable way possible, I think is really what’s gonna be that next era of U.S. dairy exports. Joe Maixner: Will, I’m gonna ask you a question, ‘ cause I’m gonna push back a little bit. You said that farmers aren’t seeing the signals because of cheese and fat. You don’t think a $17 plus Class III and an $18 Class IV basically for the next year, plus your return on beef, plus your cheap inputs on feed is not enough to get the farmers to expand? Will Loux: Oh, I think they will continue to expand. When the nonfat dry milk price shot up, I think that was a reflection that we were short on protein. That we pulled so much out of the dryer, that was that reflection. But I think as Mike even said on one of your previous podcasts, that it was really shown in the PPD rather than necessarily in the protein price. I don’t mean necessarily they’re not getting the signal, it’s just some of it’s our pricing system is a convoluted signal. Ted Jacoby III: Will, you’re speaking to the choir. Mike Brown: I’m gonna have to quote you on that one. Ted Jacoby III: I’m gonna take this opportunity to say, Will, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a fantastic discussion. I hope you come back soon and join us again, because we always love having you on our podcast. Will Loux: Always fun being with you guys. Thanks for having me on. Miguel Aragón: Bye, guys. [00:42:00] End Commercial: Mike Brown: For one part of the supply chain to be successful, everyone has to be. My superpower is practical application of data and analysis. I believe firmly that Jacoby’s success is because we help our suppliers and our buyers be successful. I’m Mike Brown, and I love working for T.C. Jacoby & Co. because I get to help people make their businesses more successful.

In this episode, we get expert view on the ongoing, historic tech wave. Ravi Vijayaraghavan, head of APAC Technology & Cloud Services practice at Bain and Company, offers a wide range of insights, starting with the implication of the unprecedented scale of capital spending on AI build-out taking place presently. We compare this tech cycle with past ones, consider sectors that are in vogue (hardware) and that are not (software). Ravi shares his observations on the state of high tech in China, US, North Asia, South-East Asia, and South Asia. We also discuss various moon-shot ideas at the frontier of tech. We conclude with the ethics of AI, and regulatory implications. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Chief Asia Economist Chetan Ahya joins Head of India Research and Chief India Equity Strategist Ridham Desai to break down India's macro outlook, capital flows and sector opportunities.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Chetan Ahya: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Chetan Ahya, Morgan Stanley's Chief Asia Economist.Ridham Desai: And I'm Ridham Desai, Morgan Stanley's Head of India Research and Chief India Equity Strategist.Chetan Ahya: Today, the biggest takeaways from our India Investment Forum in Mumbai. From the shifting outlook for India's markets and flows to the sectors driving the next phase of corporate earnings and CapEx.It's Friday, June 12th at 7PM in Hong Kong.Ridham Desai: And 4:30PM in Mumbai.Chetan Ahya: Ridham, the Morgan Stanley's India Investment Forum took place in Mumbai last week, and I was there with you. These events are a great opportunity to speak with investors who come across from the globe to attend. Now that we have had a few days to process the conversations, what stood out to you? What was the biggest shift in investor sentiment that you picked on?Ridham Desai: So, Chetan, I think it's been the case of a continuing story about India. Domestic investors look that they are bullish, and foreign investors continue to stay rather cautious on the Indian markets. We could see that in the overall attendance. In contrast, I think domestic investors were looking for the next stock that they wanted to buy. They were seeking opportunities, and there was a lot of interest in meeting companies.Before we get into markets, let me turn back to you from a macro side. India's growth story remains strong, but relative growth appears to be cooling. This is in contrast to markets like Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and the US. How should investors think about India's macro positioning in that context?Chetan Ahya: So, Ridham, when I look at the macro data in India, they're all indicating a meaningful upside in the growth trend. So I'll just cite two key cyclically sensitive macro data points. One is the banking system credit growth, and number two is the auto sales, particularly the passenger vehicle. So bank credit growth is growing as of the last biweekly data point that we got. It's growing at seventeen point seven percent year-on-year, and car sales are growing at twenty-seven percent in the month of May.But as you were mentioning earlier, the relative growth opportunity is a challenge for India and to just share the numbers on the earnings growth for the first quarter that we saw across the region. So we saw Korea's earnings growth at one hundred and seventy percent. We saw Taiwan's earnings growth at forty-eight percent year on year. Japan at thirty-three percent. The US has seen a growth of about twenty-seven percent year on year.So in that context, when India is reporting thirteen percent growth, it's becoming a challenge for investors to look for opportunities in India relative to other markets. Either they are more focused on the other markets than India. So let me come back to you, Ridham. Staying with the investment implications, India projects stable valuations and strong corporate earnings, but its relative growth advantage has narrowed. How should investors reconcile this contradiction?Ridham Desai: If I go back thirty-five years, as long as we have the MSCI index series, and as far as I have been in this industry, this is the lowest relative multiple that India has traded at. And indeed, growth last year was weak. But if you see QOQ, we have started to accelerate. The broad market earnings growth trajectory has shown a doubling in the quarter that ended March over the quarter that ended December.But it underscores the point you made about the relative growth complex. It's clearly not in India's favor. And a lot of the capital in the world is short-term oriented, and it cares for what growth is gonna come in the next quarter or two. And that's the state of the market right now.However, what I would say is that equities is a quintessential long-duration asset class. In the long run, what matters is terminal growth. I don't really think India's terminal growth has moved much. It remains far superior to a lot of other countries around the world. And therefore, I think this does present itself as a great opportunity for a long-term investor while the markets are digesting this relative growth disadvantage that India seems to have over the next, say, three or four quarters.Chetan Ahya: And Ridham, another theme from the forum was policy action to attract capital. Policymakers announced a number of measures right as our conference ended and they aimed to withdraw withholding tax on debt investors, also providing banks with an incentive to take up more dollar borrowing. How central are these measures to sustaining foreign inflows into Indian markets?Ridham Desai: I think the measures taken by policymakers are very important, probably amongst the most important policy actions this year. The removal of taxation on debt investors will make a difference. The provision for hedging to external commercial borrowings as well as to foreign currency deposits will make a difference.It should boost flows into India over the next twelve months. That said, these measures may not help the equity flows because the equity flows, I think, are going to depend on the relative growth situation. Now, there's only that much India can do to lift its growth. It may accelerate to the high teens. So growth elsewhere needs to decelerate for equity investors to return. Or India needs to see the start of a major IPO cycle because in primary issuances, foreigners do come to buy, and that may change the net picture on FBI flows in the equity markets.But as far as the debt markets are concerned, I think the measures taken last week are going to prove to be quite potent, and India should see the benefits accruing over the next few weeks and months.Chetan, from your perspective, how important is the policy backdrop right now in determining whether India can keep attracting long-term global capital despite more competitive returns elsewhere in the short run?Chetan Ahya: So Ridham, I think the key focus for the policymakers had been with these measures to boost short-term capital inflows to stabilize the currency. There has been a balance of payment deficit. So from that perspective, the short-term capital inflow augmentation effort as you mentioned, has been the correct move. But from the long-term perspective, we think that the government needs to boost competitiveness of the Indian manufacturing. Because in the context in which AI could affect India's services exports, there is a need to augment more export receipts from the manufacturing sector. At the same time, if they improve the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector, it will help India to attract more capital inflows from long-term investors for the purpose of FDI.And the good news is that the government is on it. They are taking a number of measures to boost that competitiveness in the manufacturing. But we think that there is more action needed and hopefully in the intention to improve the balance of payment dynamics and exports from manufacturing sector, we will see more actions from the government in the coming months.Ridham Desai: Chetan, you've also written extensively about the structural capital spending cycle in Asia and India. Can you walk us through the key details here, especially in the Indian context?Chetan Ahya: I think the key story that we are observing, it's sort of more or less global, but definitely very clearly seen in Asia, that there seems to be a super cycle for CapEx as well as industrial activity. This CapEx cycle is effectively driven by spending in four key sectors, and that is AI and AI-related digital infrastructure, energy, defense, and industrial onshoring-related CapEx.Now, as far as India is concerned, we are seeing investments in all the four segments that I just mentioned. In fact, it's seeing a significant amount of activity in the space of energy. And, similarly, we are seeing a lot of policy measures, I mentioned earlier, in terms of boosting manufacturing competitiveness.But at the heart of it is government's effort to onshore industrial supply chain. So India's CapEx has also inflected higher. Having said that, the difference between India and, let's say, North Asia, which is Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China, is that they are also a big player in the export market for capital goods when there is global CapEx cycle upswing happening. Nevertheless, India will see the benefit of this CapEx cycle in terms of its own growth push, as well as improvement in productivity.So Ridham, how would you think about the sectoral opportunity within the Indian markets?Ridham Desai: We see a lot of interest in some of these sectors which you mentioned. But actually, I would like to start off with financials. I see the banks in a very sweet spot. Balance sheets are in pristine condition. The interest rate cycle has troughed, which means margins for the banks have also bottomed and credit growth is finally accelerating. If this CapEx cycle unfolds like the way you are describing it, I think financials will stand to gain the most.And interestingly, the valuations are quite good, both on an absolute as well as on a relative basis. Also, of course, investors can go directly into those sectors which are doing this capital spend. Energy to start with, semiconductors, fertilizers, data centers and aerospace.The only thing to note here is that not everywhere are the valuations attractive enough because in some cases the market has recognized the coming growth cycle and has started to price that in. So we have to be careful about the valuations. But I think financials and industrials are clearly great opportunities in the context of this CapEx recovery that India is likely to see in the coming five years.Chetan Ahya: And additionally, the most requested companies at the summit, Ridham, were consumer sector companies. What do you think investors are looking for at this sector over others?Ridham Desai: So, Chetan, I think from a structural perspective, the Indian consumer is quite clearly the best place to be. In fact, I would say that it's the leverage that India enjoys over the rest of the world.The one point five billion people in this country are split across, say, a hundred and fifty cohorts of ten million each, and each of these cohorts have got different consumption opportunities. So depending on what product or service you're offering to your consumers, there's a market in India, and which in nominal terms is growing between ten and fifteen percent.As we know, last year India accounted for something around seventeen or eighteen percent of global GDP growth, which means depending again on what you are selling to your consumer, India could be between ten and hundred percent of your revenue growth. So India's consumer is something that hardly anybody can avoid.So in summary, Chetan, when I look at it from an investment opportunity, financials, industrials, and consumption, not necessarily in that particular order, are probably the best places for investors to look at. However, IT services, I think could be the dark horse. It's a sector right now which is disrupted or potentially disrupted by AI, and there's a lot of confusion there.But I think as the dust settles on this, it may emerge as one of the most interesting areas for investors to look at. So there's a lot of stuff in India happening right now. I think growth is accelerating. Valuations are looking quite interesting. In fact, the best that they've been in many, many years.Trading performance suggests that investors are not positioned at all. And if things start looking up, then India could be a very good market in the coming twelve months.Chetan Ahya: Ridham, thanks for taking the time to talk.Ridham Desai: Great speaking with you, ChetanChetan Ahya: And thanks for listening. If you enjoy our Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share the podcast with a friend or a colleague today.

Join Manpreet Gill and Raymond Cheng as they discuss the strategic benefits of broadening equity exposure, their latest views on the ECB and how investors should consider positioning their portfolios amid signs of investor froth.You can read our latest Global Market Outlook today here.Speaker(s):- Manpreet Gill, CIO of Africa, Middle East & Europe (AME/E), Standard Chartered Bank - Raymond Cheng, Chief Investment Officer, North Asia, Standard Chartered BankFor more of our latest market insights, visit Market views on-the-go or subscribe to Standard Chartered Wealth Insights on YouTube.

Marco Polo Marine has the wind in its sails as investor attention in the Singapore market turns to smaller cap stocks. Its CEO Sean Lee answers questions from BT’s Ben Paul about how he is steering the group into North Asia, why separate listings for its wind energy platform and shipyard have been proposed, and what the group will look like in 10 years. Highlights of the podcast: 03:23 New market, new platform, new vessels 08:05 Wind energy unit, shipyard to be listed 13:09 How the offshore energy sector changed 17:47 Shareholder value through fast growth --- Send your questions, thoughts, story ideas, and feedback to btpodcasts@sph.com.sg. --- Written and hosted by: Ben Paul (benpaul@sph.com.sg) With Sean Lee, CEO, Marco Polo Marine Edited by: Howie Lim & Claressa Monteiro Produced by: Ben Paul, Howie Lim & Chai Pei Chieh A podcast by BT Podcasts, The Business Times, SPH Media Follow BT Correspondents: Channel: bt.sg/btcobt Amazon: bt.sg/btcoam Apple Podcasts: bt.sg/btcoap Spotify: bt.sg/btcosp YouTube Music: bt.sg/btcoyt Website: bt.sg/btcorresp Do note: This podcast is meant to provide general information only. SPH Media accepts no liability for loss arising from any reliance on the podcast or use of third party’s products and services. Please consult professional advisors for independent advice. --- Discover more BT podcast series: BT Money Hacks: bt.sg/btmoneyhacks BT Podcasts: bt.sg/pcOM BT Market Focus: bt.sg/btmktfocus BT Lens On: bt.sg/btlensonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Marco Polo Marine has the wind in its sails as investor attention in the Singapore market turns to smaller cap stocks. Its CEO Sean Lee answers questions from BT’s Ben Paul about how he is steering the group into North Asia, why separate listings for its wind energy platform and shipyard have been proposed, and what the group will look like in 10 years. Highlights of the podcast: 03:23 New market, new platform, new vessels 08:05 Wind energy unit, shipyard to be listed 13:09 How the offshore energy sector changed 17:47 Shareholder value through fast growth --- Send your questions, thoughts, story ideas, and feedback to btpodcasts@sph.com.sg. --- Written and hosted by: Ben Paul (benpaul@sph.com.sg) With Sean Lee, CEO, Marco Polo Marine Edited by: Howie Lim & Claressa Monteiro Produced by: Ben Paul, Howie Lim & Chai Pei Chieh A podcast by BT Podcasts, The Business Times, SPH Media Follow BT Correspondents: Channel: bt.sg/btcobt Amazon: bt.sg/btcoam Apple Podcasts: bt.sg/btcoap Spotify: bt.sg/btcosp YouTube Music: bt.sg/btcoyt Website: bt.sg/btcorresp Do note: This podcast is meant to provide general information only. SPH Media accepts no liability for loss arising from any reliance on the podcast or use of third party’s products and services. Please consult professional advisors for independent advice. --- Discover more BT podcast series: BT Money Hacks: bt.sg/btmoneyhacks BT Podcasts: bt.sg/pcOM BT Market Focus: bt.sg/btmktfocus BT Lens On: bt.sg/btlensonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Roughly 5,000 new electric vehicles are due to land this week from China. This is just the first part of a shipment expected from the Chinese car manufacturing behemoth, BYD. The company is due to ship another 25,000 EVs here this year. Australians are embracing electric vehicles more than ever before, thanks to skyrocketing fuel prices. But it also comes with unanswered questions and potential complications. Today, North Asia correspondent Lisa Visentin discusses China's dizzying technological advances in EVs, and whether Australians buying these cars risk being spied on.Background reading ‘Made in China’ EVs are taking over the streets, but just how safe is your data? Subscribe to The Age & SMH: https://subscribe.smh.com.au/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Roughly 5,000 new electric vehicles are due to land this week from China. This is just the first part of a shipment expected from the Chinese car manufacturing behemoth, BYD. The company is due to ship another 25,000 EVs here this year. Australians are embracing electric vehicles more than ever before, thanks to skyrocketing fuel prices. But it also comes with unanswered questions and potential complications. Today, North Asia correspondent Lisa Visentin discusses China's dizzying technological advances in EVs, and whether Australians buying these cars risk being spied on.Background reading ‘Made in China’ EVs are taking over the streets, but just how safe is your data? Subscribe to The Age & SMH: https://subscribe.smh.com.au/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Recorded live at the Morgan Stanley and MUFG Japan Summit, our Global Chief Economist and Head of Macro Research Seth Carpenter led a discussion on Asia's exposure to the energy shock and Japan's bullish outlook.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Seth Carpenter: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Seth Carpenter, Morgan Stanley's Global Chief Economist and Head of Macro Research. And on today's episode, we're bringing you a live taping direct from Morgan Stanley and MUFG's Japan Summit to discuss the macroeconomic overlook. And, in particular, Japan's moment: reflation, reform, and the case for a structural re-rating. I am joined by Chetan Ahya, our Chief Asia Economist; Takeshi Yamaguchi, our Chief Japan Economist; Jonathan Garner, our Chief Asia and EM Equity Strategist; Koichi Sugisaki, who is our Head of Japan Macro Strategy; and Sho Nakazawa, who is our Japan Equity Strategist. Seth Carpenter: I will say we have just collectively published our mid-year outlook. So twice a year, Morgan Stanley Macro Research puts together our forecast. We take the time to debate with each other, to pressure test our views on the outlook for the next year and a half to two years. And I have to say this version of the outlook process may have been the most difficult one that I can remember. And in no small part because one of the key fundamental drivers of the outlook globally for growth, for inflation is oil, oil prices. And the swings there have been pretty dramatic. And so, as a result, we put a lot of effort into not just our baseline forecast, but also scenarios and the ways in which our baseline forecast could be wrong. But Chetan, let me start with you. Tell us a little bit about the exposure in Asia to, to the energy shock. Chetan Ahya: So Seth, you're right. Asia is one of the more exposed part of the world. But I would say that we've been surprised in the way this energy shock has been managed. One is, of course, at the global level, two big swings happened. US exports increased dramatically by 3.8 million barrels per day. Just to give you perspective, global consumption of oil is about 100 million barrels, so it's simple math in terms of how big this number was. And then China parallelly also reduced its imports by 3.5 million barrels. So, we had a 7 million barrel swing from a global oil demand balance perspective.And, secondly, as far as gas is concerned, that is where actually we were more concerned about Asia because Asia was very dependent on Middle Eastern gas. And on that front, China single-handedly has bailed out the region. So, China cut its gas imports by about 45 percent, and that had at least avoided the shortages that we were worried about. We can manage oil prices, but shortages is something very difficult to manage. So that's at the global level. And within the region, what every economy did is to switch to an alternative source of fuel, whether it is electricity generated through coal or other renewable sources. And particularly that happened in China and India, which are the two big importers of fuel in the region.And then additionally, what we also saw is that everybody managed the fuel price increase quite well. So, on an average, if I look at the stats as of today, only about 25 to 30 percent of the underlying fuel price increase has been passed on to the consumer. So, the governments are taking it, so there is a burden on the fiscal front that is building up. But as far as the consumers are concerned, this has been a help, and therefore you have not seen a big spike in inflation across the region. Seth Carpenter: Okay. So, a lot of comments about Asia in general. Let's go more specific to here in Japan. And so, Yamaguchi-san, you were an early adopter of the Japan reflation view. If we go back a year, two years, three years, you were probably more optimistic, more bullish about growth in the market than consensus. More recently, you've been a little bit more cautious about where growth is going. And so, can you tell us a little bit first why you're a bit more cautious now relative to where I suspect the market is? And then when it comes to the energy shock, how do you see it playing out with the Japanese economy? And should we worry about it derailing this whole reflation trade? Takeshi Yamaguchi: We think Japanese underlying economic fundamentals remain resilient in the sense that, you know, nominal GDP recovery will continue as a trend. But for this year, I think there's a, you know, short-term slowdown, both in terms of real GDP growth and nominal GDP growth, due to the terms of a trade shock. So far, you know, thanks to the government energy subsidies and Japan's relatively large strategic oil reserves, the direct impact on households has been limited. But we are already seeing a big increase in producer prices in the April data. It jumped to 4.9 percent {year-over-year], and we expect this producer price index will continue to go up due to the higher oil prices, but also because of the NAFTA-related supply side, you know, disruptions in areas, you know, such as, you know, construction materials, plastic products, and industrial solvents and so on. That said, we still believe that, you know, underlying economic fundamentals remain resilient in the sense that there's a structural labor shortage. So, wage growth may somewhat slow, but still I think a solid, you know, base up increase will continue next year, especially among young workers. Also, I think this structural tight labor market [is] encouraging companies to step up labor-saving investment. And, I think, together with government's initiatives for domestic investment, I think, domestic CapEx will also likely remain resilient. So, this year for nominal GDP growth, we expect, you know, slightly negative growth due to the terms of trade loss. But the next year, we are expecting above 4 percent nominal GDP growth. So, the overall, you know, story remains unchanged despite the short-term headwinds. Seth Carpenter: Okay. So fundamental story remains unchanged. We're pretty optimistic, but it's a matter of long term versus short term Jonathan, let me turn to you. Equity markets are generally optimistic, I would say, these days, but there is a bit of a divergence between views on equities here in Asia, between Japan on the one hand, and EM overall. In the mid-year outlook, you have expressed a preference for Japanese equities over EM. Can you talk a little bit about that view? Why that preference? Are there sectors or specific stocks that matter more? How are you thinking about this sort of allocation across equity markets for you in Asia? Jonathan Garner: So, certainly, as Seth indicated and Chetan and Yamaguchi-san said, it's really an environment where the sector call, particularly the CapEx, super cycle call should drive portfolios. And that naturally leads you in Asia more to North Asia, where Japan is very richly endowed in beneficiaries of the CapEx super cycle. And obviously markets like Korea and Taiwan, and much less so to South Asia, where the larger markets are much more populated by consumer and services stocks. So, in our portfolio, we're essentially overweight capital spending, underweight the consumer. And when you look at the Japan market, one of the things that my colleague Daniel Blake has done a lot of work is, is the sort of thematic exposures that exist within our coverage. The four core Morgan Stanley research themes of multipolar world, AI, tech diffusion, future of energy and societal shifts, they map into about 75 percent by stock number of our coverage for the Japan market, and they're quite nicely distributed across the stock coverage. Obviously, some stocks have more than one aspect to them. And that is highly advantageous and much more advantageous than in fact any other large market. Europe of course, doesn't have AI, tech diffusion, or it largely lacks the beneficiaries, the upstream beneficiaries. The US has legacy, sort of, software service, business models and consumer exposure. Now, it's not to say that all is sort of rosy in the garden. There are large auto OEMs here in Japan where the earnings numbers are challenged. So, it's all about the kind of the dispersion that's going on within the portfolio. But just on the base case targets, 4300 for topics, that's set by Nakazawa-san and myself. It's about 12 percent upside in the base. In the two weeks since we published the report, EM has fallen back somewhat, so there's about 8 percent upside to our EM target. But on a kind of risk-adjusted bull-bear skew, bear in mind that EM is much more skewed in terms of the earnings drivers of that market. Essentially, if you strip Korea and Taiwan out, there's no earnings growth in EM right now. You would ultimately have to favor Japan. So, Japan should be at the core of any Asia portfolio at the moment. Seth Carpenter: And can you just give us a little insight as to what you're seeing about how the market is or maybe is not pricing the threat from the energy shock? What are you seeing in equity markets, top line, down into sectors? Do you think there's enough concern? Do you think there's room for that to get, sort of, rerated just on the energy shock situation? Jonathan Garner: So, what you're seeing is that anything that is consumer-related is really struggling in terms of revisions. I think there are six different subcomponents of the consumer that we can track. Every single one of them has downgrades. And the upgrades are in energy, upstream energy, which isn't that well represented in Japan. There are a couple of names. In materials, really across the board. In semis and IT across the board, and broadly, tech hardware. And then in the defense capital goods space. And that dispersion in revisions within the Japan market or within Asia as a whole is something that I've never seen before.It does maybe to some extent question the resilience of the consumer in terms of the way that the numbers are being downgraded. So, I'll just leave that hanging a little bit. Seth Carpenter: Alright, thank you very much to my colleagues. And this is where I have to shift back into podcast mode to say thank you for listening. And if you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please share it with a colleague or friend today. Thank you very much everybody. Voice: That was Part 1 of a special two-part episode from Morgan Stanley and MUFG's Japan Summit. Join us tomorrow for Part 2 of the conversation.

The equity story across Asia has split into two very different paths this year, with North Asian markets pulling ahead on the strength of the artificial intelligence trade while remaining more insulated from the energy supply shock tied to the Middle East. Goldman Sachs Research's Tim Moe explains what is driving the divergence, why he sees the semiconductor memory cycle lasting three to five years, and what could determine whether North Asia's outperformance continues. This episode was recorded on May 19, 2026. The opinions and views expressed herein are as of the date of publication, subject to change without notice, and may not necessarily reflect the institutional views of Goldman Sachs or its affiliates. The material provided is intended for informational purposes only, and does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation from any Goldman Sachs entity to take any particular action, or an offer or solicitation to purchase or sell any securities or financial products. This material may contain forward-looking statements. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Neither Goldman Sachs nor any of its affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the statements or information contained herein and disclaim any liability whatsoever for reliance on such information for any purpose. Each name of a third-party organization mentioned is the property of the company to which it relates, is used here strictly for informational and identification purposes only and is not used to imply any ownership or license rights between any such company and Goldman Sachs. A transcript is provided for convenience and may differ from the original video or audio content. Goldman Sachs is not responsible for any errors in the transcript. This material should not be copied, distributed, published, or reproduced in whole or in part or disclosed by any recipient to any other person without the express written consent of Goldman Sachs. Disclosures applicable to research with respect to issuers, if any, mentioned herein are available through your Goldman Sachs representative or at ⁠http://www.gs.com/research/hedge.html⁠ Goldman Sachs does not endorse any candidate or any political party. Copyright 2026. All rights reserved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To follow on from last week, we start with some thoughts about Mogami frigates and why none of them will ever be built in Australia. The simple fact is that WA companies do not have the necessary experience - and building some landing craft for the Army will not get them there. Secondly, in an outrageous oversight during the bidding process, no one was asked by Defence to provide a single line of costings on how the ships will be constructed in Australia.Then some history of the Crimean War and the inability of British commander Lord Raglan to understand that the world had changed and that the enemy was different from what he was used to. This is appropriate remembering that just a fortnight ago, the retiring head of INDOPACOM USN Admiral Sam Paparo told Congress that the industrial base was not producing SSNs fast enough.All sorts of fissures are occurring in the Middle East with formerly close ally Saudi Arabia denying the US access to military bases for the short lived Project Freedom. One wonders if at some point the US and Israel might also experience a rupture.In our region, North Asia is nervously waiting for the Trump-Xi summit next week. No one knows what might happen - and this is the world we now inhabit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A ₹30 Cr pickle brand built from traditional recipes… now aiming for ₹500 Cr. But can a digital-first FMCG brand scale in India without going offline? In this episode, Niharika Bhargava (CEO, The Little Farm) and Aditya Bhargava (COO, The Little Farm) join Shantanu Deshpande (Founder & CEO, Bombay Shaving Company), along with Arjun Purkayastha (SVP & Managing Director, Greater China and North Asia, Reckitt), for a sharp conversation on building and scaling a modern food brand in India. Little Farm started by reviving family recipes and selling at farmers' markets, before moving to D2C during COVID. Today, the brand has scaled to ~₹30 Cr ARR, with 70% of its revenue driven by quick commerce, selling over 70,000 jars every month. But growth brings harder questions: What does it really take to scale from ₹30 Cr to ₹200 Cr and eventually ₹500 Cr in a highly competitive, unorganised category? From distribution strategy and channel mix to inventory planning and product expansion, this episode breaks down the real decisions founders face while scaling a consumer brand in India. Problems we solve in this episode: • When is the right time for a young brand to enter offline retail, and does discovery still happen there? • How should founders move from manual inventory planning to a scalable forecasting system while staying cash-efficient? • When should a brand deepen its core category vs expand into new SKUs or adjacent products to drive growth? If you're building a D2C or FMCG brand, this episode offers a practical look at how modern brands are scaling today, and where most founders get it wrong. Navigate your way through these chapters: 00:00 Coming up 01:31 Introduction 02:39 How a Dadi's Recipe Became Little Farms 05:22 The Journey of Scaling Little Farms 07:50 1st Question: When Is the Right Time to Enter Retail? 14:19 The Three Levers That Drive FMCG Growth 33:07 2nd Question: How to Build a Scalable Inventory System 42:00 3rd Question: When to Expand vs Deepen Your Core Category 46:33 The ‘Be Big, Be Fast, Be Bold' Approach to SKUs 01:01:17 Why Nostalgia Works in Building Brands 01:04:56 Closing Thoughts

Welcome to Risky Women Radio, the podcast that spotlights the bold, brilliant women leading change across risk, compliance, and governance. In an era where "uncertainty" has been upgraded from a buzzword to a permanent state of being, we sit down with the leaders who navigate the chaos so the rest of us can sleep at night. In this episode, Zhiyun Nai, Managing Director at Protiviti, is joined by Jean Chung, Chief Compliance Officer for Hong Kong, Greater China, and North Asia at Standard Chartered Bank. Jean is a veteran of the compliance world who has spent over two decades bridging the gap between policy and purpose. From setting international standards in Singapore to advising the Korea FIU on crypto assets, Jean has seen it all. She joins us to discuss the "80/20 rule" of global regulation, why AI might actually make her team's lives better (rather than just replacing them), and how the definition of leadership has evolved from "don't be too soft" to "empathy is your superpower". SHOWNOTES 2:19 – The Global Commonality Myth 5:48 – AI as the Ultimate Intern 13:08 – Innovation vs. The Deepfake Arms Race 23:31 – The Evolution of "Soft" Leadership 26:15 – Taking the Leap of Faith

What if the next big investment opportunity isn’t in the US, but right next door in Asia where much of AI's backbone is being built? We zoom in on the “Golden Triangle” of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, and why this region could power the next phase of global growth. From Japan’s corporate reforms to Korea’s semiconductor cycle and Taiwan’s dominance in advanced chips, the story is bigger than just tech hype. We also explore where the real AI opportunities lie - from data centres to cybersecurity - after the recent market pullback. And what about risks like currency swings and geopolitical tensions - are investors being paid enough to take them? Michelle Martin speaks with Vance Tan, Financial Services Manager at PhillipCapital - hosted by Michelle Martin.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, Gaurang Marvania (Founder, Little Rituals) joins Shantanu Deshpande (Founder & CEO, Bombay Shaving Company), along with Arjun Purkayastha (SVP & Managing Director - Greater China & North Asia, Reckitt), for a sharp conversation on building a premium baby-care brand focused on safe formulations and long-term trust with parents. Little Rituals started with just ₹50L and 3 baby oils and has now grown to a ₹23 Cr brand with a breakout sunscreen that did ₹12 Cr in revenue. Problems we solve in this episode: • Can a premium baby-care brand scale in India? • Should Little Rituals expand its product range? If you're building a D2C brand, consumer startup, or premium consumer product, this episode offers a practical look at the strategic decisions founders face while scaling a brand. Chapters: 00:00 Coming Up 01:22 Introduction 2:32 The Origin Story of Little Rituals 05:05 Growth Journey, Channels & Key Business Insights 07:07 How strong marketing drives brand growth11:35 How can a brand build trust? 23:13 How to Influence Consumers to Buy 26:26 At ₹40 Cr, what should you focus on? 37:28 Dark Store Selection, SKU Launch & Working Capital Planning 45:00 When and Why to Raise Funding 51:57 Key Expert Insights for Brand Growth 54:08 Closing Thoughts

For the first time since Platts began tracking these markets, frozen boneless chicken legs shipped to North Asia are priced higher than skinless boneless breast meat destined for the Middle East. This shift highlights changing demand and supply dynamics in the global poultry market. The podcast explores the impact of bird flu, supply chain disruptions, and how producers like Brazil are adapting to consumer preferences. Join S&P Global Energy's Graham Style, price reporter for agriculture and food (EMEA), Rubashiny Veeramohan, associate price reporter for agriculture and food (APAC), and Jessie Khor, principal analyst for Proteins, as they discuss how global events and shifting demand are reshaping the poultry landscape.

Raymond joins Manpreet to explore the investment strategy implications arising from the ongoing Middle East conflict. Raymond also shares his perspective on Chinese Internet firms ahead of the upcoming earnings report next week, and takes a closer look at the outlook across commodities and related commodity currencies.You can read our latest Weekly Market View today here.Speakers: Manpreet Gill, CIO of Africa, Middle East & Europe (AME/E), Standard Chartered Bank Raymond Cheng, Chief Investment Officer, North Asia, Standard Chartered BankFor more of our latest market insights, visit Market views on-the-go or subscribe to Standard Chartered Wealth Insights on YouTube.

Luke Boland shares insights from his journey spanning over 15 years in banking, from managing merchant relationships during the early days of contactless payments in Australia to building Standard Chartered's FinTech client coverage across Asia. In this conversation, he discusses the evolution of bank-fintech relationships, the bank's approach to supporting both global players and homegrown innovators like StraitsX and Finmo, the role of stablecoins in bridging traditional finance and digital innovation, and practical advice for FinTech founders on building strong partnerships with financial institutions.About our GuestLuke Boland is the Executive Director and Head of Fintech for ASEAN, South Asia, and GCNA (Greater China and North Asia) at Standard Chartered Bank, based in Singapore. In this role, he leads the Corporate & Investment Banking initiatives within Banks & Broker Dealers, focusing on expanding Standard Chartered's FinTech client coverage across Asia and the bank's global network.Boland joined Standard Chartered in March 2020 as Director of FinTech, and was promoted to his current executive director role in January 2024. His career spans over 15 years in banking, with a strong focus on transactional banking, cash management, and payments. Prior to Standard Chartered, he spent over a decade at National Australia Bank (NAB), where he held various leadership positions across Singapore and Melbourne, including Director of Transactional and Trade Asia and Associate Director of Transactional Banking Asia.Boland's early career included a role as Business Relations Manager at Merchantlink, a merchant acquiring business, where he developed deep expertise in card acceptance and payments infrastructure. He holds a Bachelor of Business in International Business (Applied) from RMIT University in Melbourne.Throughout his tenure at Standard Chartered, Boland has been instrumental in fostering partnerships with leading fintechs in the region, including Xfers (now StraitsX), Finmo, and Atome. He has been at the forefront of the bank's digital asset strategy, supporting the integration of stablecoin infrastructure and blockchain technology into traditional banking services. Under his leadership, Standard Chartered has positioned itself as an active participant in Asia's evolving FinTech ecosystem, supporting both global players and homegrown innovators.Directed by Paulo JoquiñoProduced by Paulo JoquiñoFollow us on LinkedIn for more updatesThe content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund. Any and all opinions shared in this episode are solely personal thoughts and reflections of the guest and the host.

From Brussels to Beijing, the United States’ largest trading partners are digesting the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn President Trump’s signature tariffs — along with his threats to impose new levies by other means. On today’s Big Take Asia podcast, host K. Oanh Ha sits down with Bloomberg’s North Asia economy and government editor Jenni Marsh and Bloomberg’s top trade editor Brendan Murray to discuss how countries across Asia are reacting to Trump’s tariff setback — and how it could boost China’s leverage at the negotiating table ahead of a high-stakes summit next month. Hosted by K. Oanh Ha; Produced by Naomi Ng and Julia Press; Reported by Jenni Marsh and Brendan Murray; Edited by Paddy Hirsch; Fact-checking by Eleanor Harrison-Dengate and David Fox; Engineering by Katie McMurran Senior Producer: Naomi Shavin; Deputy Executive Producer: Julia Weaver; Executive Producer: Nicole BeemsterboerSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

John Anderson sits down with former NSW Senior Trade and Investment Commissioner Mike Newman to examine the culture, size and direction of Australia's modern public service. While both men acknowledge the vital role of capable public servants, they question whether the system has become bloated, inward-looking and detached from the realities faced by households and businesses. At a time of falling productivity and rising cost-of-living pressures, they ask whether the balance between administration and wealth creation has drifted out of alignment.The discussion moves beyond numbers to deeper questions of accountability, incentives and institutional culture. From regulatory overreach to major project failures, Newman argues that expansion has too often come without corresponding responsibility. Yet, he also highlights examples where strong leadership and a service-first mindset have delivered genuine reform. It is a serious, practical examination of how Australia governs itself, and what must change to restore discipline, effectiveness and public trust.Mike Newman has four decades of business experience in North Asia and served as NSW's Senior Trade and Investment Commissioner to the region. He has written insightfully on many topics, and most recently on the problem of government bureaucracies.

Raymond reviews with Ray the performance of our recommendations since the release of our 2026 outlook and highlights key areas to monitor. They assess the AI theme and reaffirm an equity overweight in the US and Asia ex-Japan. The discussion also covers gold and concludes with comments on bonds.You can read our latest Global Market Outlook today here.Speakers: Raymond Cheng, Chief Investment Officer, North Asia, Standard Chartered Bank Ray Heung, Senior Investment Officer,  Standard Chartered Bank For more of our latest market insights, visit Market views on-the-go or subscribe to Standard Chartered Wealth Insights on YouTube.

No honking. No blaring engines. No exhaust. The Chinese government has crushed Beijing’s incredible noise pollution, in response to residents’ despair, with a combination of incentives and strict new rules. North Asia Correspondent Yoni Bashan is here. Read Yoni’s story - and see the video - by subscribing to our YouTube channel and checking us out at theaustralian.com.au and our app, available in your app store. This episode of The Front is produced and presented by Claire Harvey and edited by Joshua Burton. Our team includes Kristen Amiet, Lia Tsamoglou, Tiffany Dimmack, Joshua Burton and Jasper Leak, who also composed our music. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As the China growth narrative fades, attention is shifting from the New Economy to an overlooked source of income: high-dividend state-owned enterprises. Raymond Cheng explains why China’s energy and infrastructure giants have delivered strong returns even as oil prices fell. We explore how Beijing’s policy reset has effectively programmed state firms to return more cash to shareholders. Why Hong Kong-listed H-shares may offer higher yields than identical A-shares in Shanghai — and why that matters now. Plus, what Southbound Connect flows, falling bank rates, and balance-sheet quality tell cautious investors about China’s role in a diversified portfolio. Hosted by Michelle Martin with guest Raymond Cheng, Chief Investment Officer for North Asia at Standard Chartered Bank’s Wealth Solutions unit.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As we step into the New Year and take a moment to reset after the holiday season, this episode marks the final Winter re-release before we return with brand-new content.To start the year on a thoughtful note, we're revisiting one of this year's most popular episodes, perfect to enjoy with a cup of coffee or tea as you reflect on the year that's passed and look ahead to what's next, just like David will be.Thank you for being with us through the Winter re-releases, and we'll see you very soon with new episodes in the year ahead.In this episode of the FocusCore Podcast, host David Sweet interviews Karsten Michaelis, CEO for North Asia and President of DHL Global Forwarding Japan. Karsten shares his extensive experience in the logistics industry, with a particular focus on his leadership journey across various Asian countries, including Japan. He discusses the unique challenges and strategies involved in managing teams in Japan, the importance of adapting to local cultures while maintaining core management principles, and the necessity of bridging the gap between headquarters and local expectations. Additionally, Karsten touches on fostering innovation, sustainability efforts at DHL, and the evolving landscape of logistics, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The conversation provides valuable insights into the complexities of global logistics and effective leadership in a multicultural environment.The 2026 FocusCore Salary Guide is here: 2026 Salary GuideIn this episode you will hear:Karsten's strategies for adapting leadership approaches across different culturesThe importance of understanding and bridging HQ and local expectations in JapanInsights into fostering innovation and responsive leadership within a global organizationHow DHL is leveraging digital tools and AI to drive operational excellenceSustainable business practices and the future of logistics in a carbon-neutral worldKarsten's personal reflections on motivation and leadership development in the logistics industryAbout Karsten:Currently the CEO North Asia and President/Representative Director of DHL Global Forwarding Japan, Karsten is responsible for the overall strategy and development of our business in Japan, Korea, Mongolia and Philippines, which encompasses air- and oceanfreight, customs clearance, industrial projects, ocean bulk, motorsports as well as some warehouse activities.Karsten brings over two decades of forwarding experience with him which began in Germany in 1996. Since 2002, he has been working in Asia Pacific with postings in Hong Kong, Bangladesh, Australia and Singapore. Prior to his current role, Karsten held several positions with DHL Global Forwarding, heading the oceanfreight team in Asia Pacific he was responsible for the development of the ocean freight business spanning 21 countries across Asia Pacific.Karsten graduated with Honors in Business and Management Studies from Oxford Brookes University. He currently sits on the Asia Pacific Management Board for DHL Global Forwarding and is based in Tokyo.Connect with Karsten:LinkedIn:

Ray speaks with Raymond about the implications of renewed hopes for a December FOMC rate cut on risk assets. They review the equities barbell strategy for the US tech and healthcare sectors and discuss the impacts on UK government bonds and the British pound following the Autumn Budget. They conclude with a discussion on the NZD/USD outlook after the recent RBNZ meetingRead our latest Weekly Market View report here. Speakers: - Ray Heung, Senior Investment Officer,  Standard Chartered Bank - Raymond Cheng, Chief Investment Officer, North Asia, Standard Chartered Bank 

In this episode of the FocusCore Podcast, host David Sweet interviews Karsten Michaelis, CEO for North Asia and President of DHL Global Forwarding Japan. Karsten shares his extensive experience in the logistics industry, with a particular focus on his leadership journey across various Asian countries, including Japan. He discusses the unique challenges and strategies involved in managing teams in Japan, the importance of adapting to local cultures while maintaining core management principles, and the necessity of bridging the gap between headquarters and local expectations. Additionally, Karsten touches on fostering innovation, sustainability efforts at DHL, and the evolving landscape of logistics, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The conversation provides valuable insights into the complexities of global logistics and effective leadership in a multicultural environment.The 2026 FocusCore Salary Guide is here: 2026 Salary Guide In this episode you will hear:Karsten's strategies for adapting leadership approaches across different culturesThe importance of understanding and bridging HQ and local expectations in JapanInsights into fostering innovation and responsive leadership within a global organizationHow DHL is leveraging digital tools and AI to drive operational excellenceSustainable business practices and the future of logistics in a carbon-neutral worldKarsten's personal reflections on motivation and leadership development in the logistics industryAbout Karsten:Currently the CEO North Asia and President/Representative Director of DHL Global Forwarding Japan, Karsten is responsible for the overall strategy and development of our business in Japan, Korea, Mongolia and Philippines, which encompasses air- and oceanfreight, customs clearance, industrial projects, ocean bulk, motorsports as well as some warehouse activities.Karsten brings over two decades of forwarding experience with him which began in Germany in 1996. Since 2002, he has been working in Asia Pacific with postings in Hong Kong, Bangladesh, Australia and Singapore. Prior to his current role, Karsten held several positions with DHL Global Forwarding, heading the oceanfreight team in Asia Pacific he was responsible for the development of the ocean freight business spanning 21 countries across Asia Pacific.Karsten graduated with Honors in Business and Management Studies from Oxford Brookes University. He currently sits on the Asia Pacific Management Board for DHL Global Forwarding and is based in Tokyo.Connect with Karsten: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-michaelis-7074955/Connect with David Sweet:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drdavidsweet/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/focuscorejp Facebook: :https://www.facebook.com/focuscoreasiaInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/focuscorejp/ Website: https://www.japan.focuscoregroup.com/ This podcast was proudly produced by Lisa Yasuda.“Doin' the Uptown Lowdown,” used by permission of...

As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency. In this episode, K. G. joins me to discuss his research on the morin khuur, or “horse fiddle,” in Mongolia, and how Mongolians use the traditional instrument to express and envision human and more-than-human futures against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency. In this episode, K. G. joins me to discuss his research on the morin khuur, or “horse fiddle,” in Mongolia, and how Mongolians use the traditional instrument to express and envision human and more-than-human futures against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency. In this episode, K. G. joins me to discuss his research on the morin khuur, or “horse fiddle,” in Mongolia, and how Mongolians use the traditional instrument to express and envision human and more-than-human futures against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency. In this episode, K. G. joins me to discuss his research on the morin khuur, or “horse fiddle,” in Mongolia, and how Mongolians use the traditional instrument to express and envision human and more-than-human futures against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency. In this episode, K. G. joins me to discuss his research on the morin khuur, or “horse fiddle,” in Mongolia, and how Mongolians use the traditional instrument to express and envision human and more-than-human futures against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

For the first time in five years, emerging market equities are outperforming their developed market peers. But what's driving this rally? Interestingly enough, this boom is driven by a rather small number of stocks, mainly located in North Asia.In this episode of the Beyond Markets podcast, Nenad Dinic, Emerging Market Equity Strategist and Manuel Villegas, Next Generation Research Analyst, discuss with Ayako Lehmann why emerging market equities are having this strong run, to what extent developed markets are highly dependent on AI components coming from Asia and whether the usual commodities and macro factors that used to be the key drivers of EM equities have lost their importance or not and what this all means when it comes to diversifying a global portfolio.(00:11) - Introduction (00:54) - What drove past emerging markets equity rallies? (01:48) - What exactly has changed now? (03:02) - Is Asia matching the U.S. AI boom? (05:36) - Will Asia soon lead AI markets? (08:16) - Where is the U.S. & China story going? (11:07) - Will the shift in EM from commodities to tech remain? (16:12) - Is portfolio diversification with EM still relevant? (21:40) - Do we remain constructive on AI globally? (24:40) - Closing remarks Would you like to support this show? Please leave us a review and star rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hannah speaks with Raymond about the US-China trade tensions and what it means for US and China Equities. They also cover other opportunities in the market including UK Gilts and EM Local Currency Bonds. Read our latest Weekly Market View report here.  Speakers:   Raymond Cheng, Chief Investment Officer, North Asia, Standard Chartered Bank Hannah Chew, Portfolio Strategist, Standard Chartered Bank 

Manpreet speaks to Raymond about the US government shutdown, its implications for stocks, bonds and the US Dollar, and why we like gold long-term.Find out more from our latest Weekly Market Outlook report here. Speakers:  - Manpreet Gill, CIO of Africa, Middle East & Europe (AME/E) and Head of Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities (FICC) Strategy, Standard Chartered Bank - Raymond Cheng, Chief Investment Officer, North Asia,  Standard Chartered Bank 

Our Head of India Research Ridham Desai and leaders from Morgan Stanley Investment Management Arjun Saigal and Jitania Kandhari discuss how India's promising macroeconomic trajectory and robust capital markets are attracting more interest from global investors. Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript ----- Ridham Desai: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Ridham Desai, Morgan Stanley's Head of India Equity Research and Chief India Equity Strategist. Today, the once in a generation investment opportunities Morgan Stanley sees in India. Joining me in the studio, Arjun Saigal, Co-Head of Morgan Stanley Investment Management at India Private Equity, and Jitania Khandari, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Head of Macros and Thematic Research for EM Public Equity. It's Tuesday, September 23rd at 4pm in Mumbai. Jitania Kandhari: And 6:30am in New York. Ridham Desai: Right now, India is already the world's fourth largest economy, and we believe it's on track to becoming the third largest by the end of this decade. If you've been following our coverage, you know, Morgan Stanley has been optimistic about India's future for quite some time. It's really a perfect storm – in a good way. India has got a growing young workforce, steady inflation, and is benefiting from some big shifts in the global landscape. When you put all of that together, you get a country that's set up for long-term growth. Of course, India is also facing pressure from escalating tariffs with the U.S., which makes this conversation even more timely. Jitania, Arjun, what are the biggest public and private investment opportunities in India that you'd highlight. Jitania Kandhari: I'd say in public equities there are five broad thematic opportunities in India. Financialization of savings and structurally lower credit costs; consumption with an aspirational consumer and a growing middle-class; localization and supply chain benefits as a China +1 destination; digitization with the India stack that is helping to revolutionize digital services across industries; and CapEx revivals in real estate and industrials, especially defense and electrification. Arjun Saigal: I will just break down the private markets into three segments. The first being the venture capital segment. Here, it's generally been a bit of hit or miss; some great success stories, but there've also been a lot of challenges with scale and liquidity. Coming to the large cap segment, this is the hundred million dollars plus ticket size, which attracts the large U.S. buyout funds and sovereign wealth funds. Here target companies tend to be market leaders with scale, deep management strength, and can be pretty easily IPO-ed. And we have seen a host of successful PE-backed IPOs in the space. However, it has become extremely crowded given the number of new entrants into the space and the fact that regional Asia funds are allocating more of their dollars towards India as they shift away from China. The third space, which is the mid-market segment, the $50- to $100 million ticket size is where we believe lies the best risk reward. Here you're able to find mid-size assets that are profitable and have achieved market leadership in a region or product. These companies have obvious growth drivers, so it's pretty clear that your capital's able to help accelerate a company's growth path. In addition, the sourcing for these deals tends to be less process driven, creating the ability to have extended engagement periods, and not having to compete only on price. In general, it's not overly competitive, especially when it comes to control transactions. Overall, valuations are more reasonable versus the public markets and the large cap segment. There are multiple exit routes available through IPO or sale to large cap funds. We're obviously a bit biased given our mid-market strategy, but this is where we feel you find the best risk reward. Ridham Desai: Jitania, how do these India specific opportunities compare to other Emerging Markets and the developed world? Jitania Kandhari: I will answer this question from two perspectives. The macro and the markets. From a macro perspective, India, as you said, has better demographics, low GDP per capita with catchup potential, low external vulnerability, and relatively better fiscal dynamics than many other parts of the world.It is a domestic driven story with a domestic liquidity cycle to support that growth story. India has less export dependency compared to many other parts of the emerging and developed world, and is a net oil importer, which has been under pressure actually positively impacting commodity importers. Reforms beginning in 2017 from demonetization, GST, RERA and other measures to formalize the economy is another big difference. From a market standpoint, it is a sectorally diversified market. The top three sectors constitute 50 percent in India versus around 90 percent in Taiwan, 66 percent in Brazil, and 57 percent overall in EM. Aided by a long tail of sectors, India screens as a less concentrated market when compared to many emerging and developed markets. Ridham Desai: And how do tariffs play into all this? Jitania Kandhari: About 50 percent of exports to the U.S. are under the 50 percent tariff rate. Net-net, this could impact 30 to 80 basis points of GDP growth.Most impacted are labor intensive sectors like apparel, leather, gems and jewelry. And through tax cuts like GST and monetary policy, government is going to be able to counter the first order impacts. But having said that, India and U.S. are natural partners, and hence this could drag on and have second order impacts. So can't see how this really eases in the short term because neither party is too impacted by the first order impacts. U.S. can easily replace Indian imports, and India can take that 30 basis point to 50 basis points GDP impact. So, this is very unlike other trade deals where one party would have been severely impacted and thus parts were created for reversals. Ridham Desai: What other global themes are resonating strongly for India? And conversely, are there themes that are not relevant for investing in India? Jitania Kandhari: I think broadly three themes globally are resonating in India. One is demographics with the growing cohort of millennials and Gen Z, leading to their aspirations and consumption patterns. India is a large, young urbanizing population with a large share in these demographic cohorts. Supply chain diversification, friend-shoring, especially in areas like electronics, technology, defense, India is an integral part of that ecosystem. And industrials globally are seeing a revival, especially in areas like electrification with the increased usage of renewables. And India is also part of that story given its own energy demands. What are the themes not relevant for investing in India is the aging population, which is one of the key themes in markets like North Asia and Eastern Europe, where a lot of the aging population drivers are leading to investment and consumption patterns. And with the AI tech revolution, India has not really been part of the AI picks and shovels theme like other markets in North Asia, like Korea, Taiwan, and even the Chinese hardware and internet names. Globally, in selected markets, utilities are doing well, especially those that are linked to the AI data center energy demand; whereas in India, this sector is overregulated and under-indexed to growth. Ridham Desai: Arjun, how does India's macro backdrop impact the private equity market in particular? Arjun Saigal: So, today India has scale, growth, attractive return on capital and robust capital markets. And frankly, all of these are required for a conducive investment environment. I also note that from a risk lens, given India being a large, stable democracy with a reform-oriented government, this provides extra comfort of the country being an attractive place to invest. You know, we have about $3 billion of domestic money coming into the stock market each month through systematic investment plans. This tends to be very stable money, versus previously where we relied on foreign flows, which were a lot more volatile in nature. This, in turn, makes for some very attractive PE exits into the public markets. Ridham Desai: Are there some significant intersections between the public and private equity markets? Arjun Saigal: You know, it tends to be quite limited, but we do see two areas. The first being pre-IPO rounds, which have been taking place recently in India, where we do see listed public funds coming into these pre-IPO rounds in order to ensure a certain minimum allocation in a company. And secondly, we do see that in certain cases, PE investors have been selectively making pipe investments in sectors like financial services, which have multiple decade tailwinds and require regular capital for growth. Unlike developed markets, we've not seen too many take private deals being executed in India due to the complex regulatory framework. This is perhaps an area which can open up more in the future if the process is simplified. Ridham Desai: Finally, as a wrap up, what do you both think are the key developments and catalysts in India that investors should watch closely? Arjun Saigal: We believe there are a couple of factors, one being repeat depreciation. Historically this has been at 2.5 to 3 percent, and unfortunately, it's been quite expensive to hedge the repeat. So, the way to address this is to sort of price it in. The second is full valuations. India has never been a cheap market, but in certain pockets, valuations of listed players are becoming quite concerning and those valuations in turn immediately push up prices in the large ticket private market space. And lastly, I would just mention tariffs, which is an evolving situation. Jitania Kandhari: I would add a couple more things. Macro equilibrium in India should be sustained – as India has been in one of the best positions from a macroeconomic standpoint. Private sector CapEx is key to drive the next leg of growth higher. Opportunities for the youth to get productively employed is critical in development of an economy. And India has always been in a geopolitical sweet spot in the last few years, and with the tariff situation that needs some resolution and close monitoring. All of this is important for nominal growth, which ultimately drives nominal earnings growth in India that are needed to justify the high valuations. Ridham Desai: Arjun, Jitania, thank you both for your insights. Arjun Saigal: Great speaking with you Ridham. Jitania Kandhari: Thank you for having us on the show. Ridham Desai: And thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today.

Manpreet speaks to Raymond about key takeaways from the Fed policy meeting, why equities should be well supported and the risk of rising bond yields short term. Find out more from our latest Weekly Market Outlook report here. Speakers:  - Manpreet Gill, CIO of Africa, Middle East & Europe (AME/E) and Head of Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities (FICC) Strategy, Standard Chartered Bank - Raymond Cheng, Chief Investment Officer, North Asia,  Standard Chartered Bank 

Jeremy Au, Shiyan Koh, and Dmitry Levit dissect the collapse of eFishery, the breakdown of Indonesia's growth narrative, and the systemic risks that resurface in Southeast Asia's venture ecosystem. They explore how IPO failures and inequality capped consumer demand, why bad faith actors gained visibility, and how boom-era fads like embedded lending and play to earn unraveled. Their discussion highlights how funding has reset to 2016 levels, why board oversight is crucial, and where opportunities in agritech and supply chain digitization still remain. 06:07 Unicorn Religion and Reset: Dmitry explains how the belief in Southeast Asia's consumer population created artificial unicorns, attracted global capital, and birthed a generation of investors dependent on unicorn rounds. With that narrative now broken, funding has reset to 2016 levels. 14:25 Indonesia's Narratives Collapse: Once built on consumer growth and SME digitization, Indonesia's investment stories unraveled after weak IPO results and late-stage funding pullback. This led to the retreat of corporates and VCs, shrinking available capital. 20:14 Redefining the Middle Class: Dmitry critiques World Bank definitions, pointing out that Indonesia's true “digital middle class” is closer to 12–20 million spending users, not 70 million. This smaller but wealthier segment supports realistic billion-dollar outcomes. 23:24 Bad Faith Actors and Fraud: The eFishery scandal highlighted systemic risks in Indonesia's ecosystem. Dmitry frames it as long-standing misaligned incentives—founders chasing salaries or secondaries—surfacing explosively rather than new corruption. 27:18 Embedded Fintech Debate: Jeremy calls out poorly governed lending arms disguised as platform metrics. Dmitry and Shiyan counter that embedded finance, if properly structured, remains one of the most capital-efficient models in Southeast Asia. 30:35 Capital Efficiency Lessons: Dmitry shares research showing the most efficient companies in Southeast Asia were fintech enablers or platforms layering financial services. These delivered 7x–12x returns on invested capital, shaping their core investment thesis. 37:49 Profitable but Overlooked Players: Despite noise about failed IPOs, Dmitry highlights a dozen Southeast Asian companies quietly positioned for billion-dollar exits, already attracting $300–400M investments from North Asia and Latin America. Watch, listen or read the full insight at  https://www.bravesea.com/blog/dmitry-levit-shiyan-koh-efishery-fraud-reset Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VakR55X6BIElUEvkN02e TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jeremyau Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeremyauz Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeremyau LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bravesea English: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Bahasa Indonesia: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Chinese: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Vietnamese: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts

This week on The Fin, North Asia correspondent Jessica Sier and Lowy Institute senior fellow Richard McGregor on whether Panda diplomacy works and why Beijing needs a succession plan. This podcast is sponsored by Workday.China ordered this Aussie flower farm to grow rice. Then they found a solutionIn a country of 1.4 billion people, keeping everyone fed can be the difference between stability and chaos. The Lynch Group nearly had to tear down its greenhouses.Beyond the Wall: Albanese’s high-stakes China playAs the prime minister is criticised over the extent of his China sightseeing, the government insists it is playing the long game and that face time matters.Rumours of Xi’s downfall distract from China’s real challengesThe notion that Xi Jinping is about to be toppled is a distraction from the real cleavages in Chinese politics.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Energy names rally, IPOs pop, and WhatsApp rewrites the rules. Hosted by Michelle Martin with Ryan Huang, this episode covers a spike in SGX-listed oil plays like Rex International and RH Petrogas. We explore Meta’s plans to monetise WhatsApp, Goldman Sachs' bullish stock picks including Apple and Valvoline, and the return of IPO mania. Will Apple’s antitrust woes drag it down? Can DBS’s expansion in North Asia fuel growth? And is Kering’s next CEO really from the auto world? Dive into the movers that matter.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Manpreet speaks to Raymond about whether the US equity market rebound has legs, why we still expect a soft landing and our top views across global equity, bond and currency markets. Read our latest Global Market Outlook here. Speakers: Manpreet Gill, CIO of Africa, Middle East & Europe (AME/E) and Head of Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities (FICC) Strategy, Standard Chartered Bank Raymond Cheng, CIO of North Asia,  Standard Chartered Bank For more of our latest market insights, visit Market views on-the-go or subscribe to Standard Chartered Wealth Insights on YouTube.

Paul Everingham joins Ray and Jim to explain that liquefied natural gas (LNG) demand in Asia is expected to nearly double by 2050. The initial growth will be driven by North Asia (especially China), with South Asia and Southeast Asia becoming the main growth centers after 2035. This surge is tied to Asia's rapid economic development, growing energy needs, and the region's transition from coal.Asia is projected to account for 50% of global economic growth and a growing share of global emissions. Addressing energy needs and emissions in Asia is crucial for global climate goals and humanitarian progress, as many Asian countries still rely heavily on coal and lack access to clean energy and modern amenities.Paul describes LNG as more than just a bridge to renewables—it's vital for economic and national security, and asserts that LNG is cleaner than coal and oil and provides reliable "baseload" and "peaking" power, which renewables like wind and solar currently can't match due to their intermittency and storage limitations.The Biden administration's pause on US LNG export facilities was discussed, with Paul arguing that such moves are more political than scientific. He stresses that immediate transitions from coal to renewables aren't feasible in Asia due to infrastructure and storage constraints, and that gas is essential for meeting Paris climate commitments.Despite a slowing economy and population decline, China's energy demand is rising as it seeks to reduce new coal plant construction and diversify gas imports away from reliance on Russia. China is investing in both renewables and LNG to ensure energy security.The conversation highlights that global energy demand is rising, not just shifting. Coal use is at record highs, and the US is facing new surges in energy demand due to AI and data centers. Paul advocates for an "all of the above" approach, including nuclear, gas, and renewables, to meet growing needs.Paul says LNG offers more flexible supply options than pipeline gas, reducing dependency on single suppliers. However, building out LNG infrastructure is capital-intensive and complex. The US, Qatar, and Australia are the dominant LNG exporters, but the US is expected to become the leading supplier by 2040, especially as Asian demand grows.Qatar is a major player due to its vast gas reserves and strategic, conservative development. Indonesia and Malaysia were early LNG exporters, but their fields are now in decline. The US, with its massive shale gas reserves, is poised to shape global markets, especially as new fields come online.The vulnerability of LNG supply lines to blockades (e.g., Taiwan) and the strategic importance of the South China Sea's energy resources were discussed. China's control over disputed areas impacts the ability of countries like the Philippines and Vietnam to develop their own gas fields.Follow us on X, @IndoPacPodcast; or on LinkedIn or BlueSky.Follow Ray Powell on X (@GordianKnotRay) or on LinkedIn.Follow Jim Carouso on LinkedIn.This podcast is sponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific.

According to research from Gartner, channel partners are crucial levers of revenue generation, accounting for up to 75% of revenue income. So how can you build efficient and deeply engaged channel partner relationships to optimize channel sales? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Jason Singh, the head of global partner marketing at Meta. Thank you for joining us. Jason, I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Jason Singh: Thank you very much for having me. So I look after partner marketing for business messaging, specifically at Meta, which is our conversational platforms around Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. Being in B2B, marketing, sales, and marketing my entire life. We started in Australia and then moved over to Singapore and then New York about five years ago. What we do is three main things. We focus on ensuring that our partners have all the information that they need to be able to run their programs that they want to around business messaging. The second thing that we do is ensure that they have the right tools and materials. They’re able to grow their business. So that’s partner enablement, whereas where a lot of the Highspot focuses is within. And then lastly, it’s partner demand generation. So making sure that partners have the right investment from us, whether it’s time, dollars, et cetera, to be able to add fuel to their demand generation five. So those are three different programs that we have and where we focus a lot of our attention. SS: I’m excited to have you here, Jason, as a fellow marketing leader, and as you mentioned in your introduction, you have extensive experience across multitudes of regions, including Australia and Asia, and you really have a global perspective on how to bring the channel partner ecosystem to life? How has this diverse background shaped your approach to channel enablement? JS: The role that I have now is my first full-time role where I focused purely on partners previously being in and out of partner marketing and partners as a key audience over the past 15 years. But I took on this partner marketing leadership role officially about 24 months ago. And one of the things that I found out in that, firstly in the first 90 days, I think I met our top 35, 40% of our partners because I didn’t want to assume what they needed to know and the information they need to have and the formats that they needed to have it in and read rates of emails and, and downloads of contents. And I didn’t wanna assume. And so I spoke to a lot of them and it was super, super interesting that there were hardly any patterns. If you spoke with APAC partners, you would think you’d be able to put them into a category if you spoke with India partners similarly versus Latam, Spanish speaking Latam versus Brazil, North America… There weren’t really any regional patterns or trends. It was only when you looked at all partners globally, were you able to look at how partners operate and start compartmentalizing them into different groups, which would then give you a cohort to then cater around in terms of enablement, content, information, demand generation, et cetera. So I think one of the things that, having a diverse background where I. Help me to figure out is don’t assume in the first place, don’t assume more partners are the same. When I, when I was based in APAC, you would think Southeast Asia would be compartmentalized North Asia, so Japan, Korea, China could be compartmentalized and there we have these sub regions within the APAC region where we say, oh, okay, they operate the same, but it’s actually quite different. And so I think that really helped me coming into this global role because I was able to remove that assumption that we have these groupings, these cohorts, that because they’re based in certain regions, because they’ve got certain demographic attributes which are similar, but they’ll work the same way. And so instead of relying on those assumptions, what we did was just net new partner discovery, speaking with partners, getting, building really strong relationships with a lot of our great partners, and then figuring out what those groups are outside of. Demographic regional assumptions. SS: I love that you went in there unassuming and just really kind of learned what the partner ecosystem needed in today’s fast pace evolving environment. What would you say you were hearing are maybe some of the top challenges in channel partner sales and how are you addressing some of these challenges? JS: There is so much opportunity for the channel that they often struggle with. Prioritizing opportunities. If you look at any one of our partners, they partner with us somewhat exclusive, but many partners, partner with a number of other technology providers, and then within each technology provider there are end number of products of go-to market motions of incentives of programs. That they could be a part of. And within each of these standard operating procedures, there are processes, there are portals, there are hubs to sign into, passwords, usernames to remember. And then you’ve got the teams within these organizations that they need to make sure that they’re building relationships with the incumbent partner teams, the the senior leadership marketing teams like myself, et cetera. So it’s no surprise that when you speak to a partner that they’re often doing this. Inner calculation in their head around how important is this? Is this opportunity right now? Is this new product that we’re launching, A new program that we have is our H two market development fund, which we’ll launch in June. How important is this to me right now in the near future and in the long term? And how do I figure out what level of resources to invest? And that could be turning up to a meeting, that could be turning up to a webinar, or that could be. Injecting a couple hundred thousand dollars. That is, I would say by far, the most top of mind thing right now with our channel partners is. What is the actual opportunity with this thing that we’re being positioned with right now, and what do we need to do around this? SS: Yeah, absolutely. Kind of building on that, what do you believe are the key building blocks then for being able to foster really strong and effective partnerships with those channel sales teams? JS: I mean, I think I touched on that first point a little bit, so I’ll expand. Not assuming firstly and not doing groupings or categorization by those assumptions is super important because all of our partners operate probably a little bit differently to how we expect them to operate. The second bit is, I’ll speak my partner marketers lens specifically is learning about how these partners operate. You’ve gotta know who these partners are. You have to build relationships with partner marketers, salespeople, alliance managers. Marketing operations people within the partners. I’m very fortunate to have built a pretty strong relationship with probably about 40 or 50 people within our top 40, 50 partners in different partner groupings for our strategic partners, our tech partners, our service partners, where I’m starting to build a little bit more relationships now with our agency partners as well. And so I’m starting to get a really strong idea about how these partners operate. When I say how they operate, I’m talking about what are their incentives, what are their KPIs? What are the needles that they’re trying to move? Number two is how they actually work internally. So what are the processes? What are the procedures? What are the operating models? What are the systems? What are the tools that they use internally to help them get their work done? And lastly, it’s what are their expectations and what are their needs from us? What do they actually need right now? And that could be something as simple as one of the biggest things that we did. I think last year we’ll start rolling out more decks in Google Docs because we found that a lot of our partners wanted Google Docs because that’s how they operate and wanted the option of Google Docs as well as PowerPoint. And that subtle shift made, I don’t know, 10 partners to be able to work with our content from. Four days, two instantly because from Highspot, they could download that and ship it straight away, or just share organically within Highspot as opposed to having to download it, manipulating it, and then distribute it. And so you’ve really gotta invest the time and the effort to intentionally want to learn about your partners. It’s not a tick in the box of, oh hey, I can show my leadership that I met with 10 partners in Q1. It’s you being able to represent the partner voice. Across all of the different touch points that you have within the organization, whether that’s building content, building plans, talking with leadership. I would say once you get them out of email into a WhatsApp group or a WhatsApp chat, that’s where the real sort of connection happens, and that’s when you can start, like what I do now is when we’ve got a new piece of content, a new program that we’re building, I will take a screenshot of that and I’ll send it to about 12 different people from a different partners on WhatsApp just to get their input and they’ll respond very quickly within a couple hours globally, and they’ll start tell me what they like, what they don’t like, how it’ll work, how it won’t work, and that sort of instant feedback loop that I get with the partners have been cultivated over six months of getting to know them. So I won’t provide like three things that you need to do. I’ll provide, I’ll make it super simple with. The P zero thing that you need to do is build a relationship with your partners, really intentional, meaningful relationships with your partners and get to know them. SS: I think that’s fantastic advice. Jason, to shift gears a little bit, you developed a framework — Learn, Adopt, and Grow to keep channel partners engaged, kind of beyond the onboarding portion of coming on with Meta. Can you tell us more about this framework and what each of the phases entails? JS: Definitely. Before I took over partner marketing, we had a really strong content development arm, but we, we lacked a little bit in the structuring of our content and from a partner point of view. Some of the feedback that we had from our partners when I took on the role and start a meeting with them was, got too many assets on there. There’s there’s too much stuff. We don’t know where to start. One of the assumptions that we made internally actually right at the start was, oh, we need to split this by product type partners, want to know individually by products. And that’s when we sort of paused a little bit. ’cause that didn’t make a whole bunch of sense to me and a few of the other folks in my team. And we went to our partners and plus it didn’t specifically tell us this, it was very clear that partners had different levels of maturity. And within their teams there were different levels of maturity. So partner A may have a sales team that’s super advanced, but their marketing team hasn’t yet really been enabled on business messaging on WhatsApp Messenger or Instagram Direct. And so what we decided to test was how do we group our programs, our content, our materials that aligns with partner maturity. So we split these in, into three different cohorts of partners. Number one, they’re the partners that just kicked off, just finished onboarding, like you said, and, and they’re looking to learn. They’re looking to learn about the products, the platforms, the incentive, our programs, how we go to market. It’s a learn phase. And so we built this category of, of learn, and we started mapping almost, I think two years ago or 18 months ago, we started mapping all of our 101 content and then the second one is adopt. We notice that a lot of partners have at that stage now where they want to, they wanna kickstart some stuff. They wanna launch some programs. They wanna launch a sales program around WhatsApp. They wanna launch a campaign. They want to do internal education. I. Show globally around education, around meta business messaging, and this is all around how do they get from zero to one. And so that was around adoption or expansion where partners have finished that learn phase and they’ve decided they’ve onboarded and they’ve internally prioritized business messaging. Sort of the tier one things of the, what they wanna do. And so in here is a lot of sales materials, marketing materials, program materials to help them to get from zero to one and launching stuff. And so we do things like sales toolkits. We do things like partner ready campaigns, which are campaigns that marketing teams within our partners can give to their. Campaign team and you’ve got landing page designs. You’ve got social media kits, we provide Figma files, co-branded assets, everything that you need. Basically 80% of the stuff that you need to launch a marketing campaign or a sales campaign. And then lastly, we’ve got Grow. Grow is made up of a series of programs that have fairly high investment but are built purely to 10 XROI or ROI. And this is where we partner. We wanna make the programs available. All of our partners, but there’s pretty strict qualification, uh, or eligibility criteria to be part of one of these programs. But essentially these are programs where a partner’s already pretty successful. They know how to sell business mission. They know how to pick the concept and the product they’ve got runs on the board. They’ve got considerable pipeline or revenue already, and they’re looking at options for meta to help them grow this to 10 x, 50 x to a hundred x what they’re already doing. And so that’s grow. That’s when you’ve already mastered. The learn. You know all about the product, the platforms, the programs available to you. You’ve already started driving product adoption or portfolio adoption using our tools, and now you’ve got that. You’ve got a good run rate, but you’re wondering. How you can actually really blow this up. So that’s, that’s our growth phase. And we’ve probably got about 15 to 20% of our partners, I would say, are in there. I would say the lion’s share 50, 60%, 50% probably in that middle bucket. And we’ve got another maybe 15% right now in Learn. But as we expand our partner ecosystem and we open up our ecosystem to different types of partners. Marketplace partners, commerce partners, agencies, et cetera. We will see them starting at learn. We’ll see a lot more people or that waiting shift a little bit more to learn. And then over the course of six months to a year, we’ll see them starting through that process. SS: I love that framework because it really helps kind of guide them through their evolution and their journey with meta. So that’s amazing. And you know, on a similar note, you actually spoke at Highspot user conference last year and you had shared that relevance and timeliness are key to driving adoption with channel sales teams. How do you ensure these elements are really embedded into all of your programs? JS: It’s a hard one. Um, relevance for me focuses on, it’s a three-legged stool. Relevance is all about making sure that the CONT is, I would say firstly it’s format and it’s probably a little bit reversed from how. The majority. Think about it. I think about format, because again, knowing our partners, and this comes with knowing the partners, there are a hundred things that a partner could be doing in any given day. If they’ve decided in half an hour to focus on something related to partner enablement, what I look after and they open up a document and it’s not in the format that they need. So they’re expecting a one pager because I’ve called something intro to x. They’re expecting a one pager, but it’s an 80 page SOP that’s in Microsoft Word that, that they’ve gotta open up on their mobile device and look through it. They’re gonna close that window and they’re not gonna spend the time necessarily finding the thing that they want. They’re gonna shift their mind into focusing on something completely different. So format for me in terms of relevance is key. Making sure that when we launch something, it is in the format that it needs to be in. We have a really strong understanding about the length, the detail within that document. We have a really strong understanding in the time of the day and the mental mode that a part of the audience is gonna be. When they open up this document, are they looking for something really quick that they can share with something? Are they gonna be expecting something really detailed, which they can absorb and then distill for other teams? Are they gonna be looking for something on the go, on the way to a client meeting? And so format number one is, is big for me. And relevance the other legs, uh, of that stool would be. I would say I would include timeliness within that. It’s making sure that we are producing things within the right timeframe requirements of that audience. And so what I mean by that is often what you’ll see with teams is they launch things in phases. You’ll wanna enable a partner on a new product, and you’ll have this phased out over a 12 month period. Quite often that’s done based on the requirements of the internal team and not what the partner’s requirements actually are, and so you’ll almost enable them 20% to do what you want them to do because you’ve got other things coming in phase two, phase three, what we like to do is we like to build our phase one. We used to also launch in phases. We build our phase one point of view. But then we share that with the partners and say, hey, is this the MVP that you need? Like we think it’s these four materials. Do you actually need something else? And they’ll give us feedback. We do this formally, but we also do this informally through like our WhatsApp groups, as I mentioned before. And they’ll come back and say, hey, that ROI calculator that you’re building for phase three, we’d love that in phase one, which we’ve got some pipeline right now that we can accelerate to closure if we were have to show them a stronger ROI through some sort of tool. And what you’re building is perfect for us and so we will recalibrate internally to try and build an asset that’s in phase two, phase three into phase one. Or they’ll say, hey, we don’t actually need this narrative right now. We’ve built this PowerPoint deck already. We’ve got what we need. You can push that out for some other partners that may not be at the stage right now. So again, like having a good understanding of the partner, but also just sharing with the partner, having partners at the core of what you’re actually building in your development cycle is part important and part of and timeliness. And lastly, would be how you launch. So we talk about relevance in terms of making sure got the right format of the materials, the right details within each of the specific assets. We talk about timeliness. I’d say lastly, it’s how you actually launch something. We’ve had to get pretty creative about how we launch certain programs and just projects and and campaigns internally. The main reason being, as I mentioned before, partnered with a hundred things that they could be doing, and so you have to ask yourself, how do you cut through the noise? With those 101 things that partners have to think about every given day, and it could be soft launching, it could be launching with a smaller group of partners, building a case study around partner success, and then using that to launch to the other 80% of partners. But thinking a little bit more creatively around how you launch something so they can build internally. And understanding about how this particular thing is important to me right now is relevant to me right now. Versus the other a hundred things that got going on. SS: I love that approach and clearly it must be working because you guys have recently increased the number of partner organizations that are engaging with Highspot by 21%. I’d love for you to walk us through that journey. What strategies played AQ role in driving these results? JS: Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s kind of, we mentioned before around a format, format launch and, and timeliness. When I joined the team in this specific role, having worked with partners before in various roles and be being a partner to a lot of organizations previously as well, I understood the importance of a content management system. You know, we have typically you have partner managers that. Manage your top under know 10, 15, 20% of partners, but then you’ve got this medium tail and this long tail that you need to activate and you do that through documentation. We had a pretty good Highspot experience previously, but again, there was, there was little organization done around it. And so the first thing I kind of did was, you know, take off my, my partner marketing hat and put my partner hat on access Highspot and go. Let me do the top five to 10 things that a partner would need to do, and I had that list after chatting with the partners in my first 60, 90 days, and I noticed that almost every single one of the top 10 things that a partner needs to do was a real struggle in Highspot and not because of the tool, but because of how we had structured our Highspot experience. It wasn’t aligned to how partners want to actually use it. And so we focused in 2023. In the early part of 24, we predominantly focused on three things. We focused on content, making sure we did a pretty comprehensive content audit. I think we had about something like six and a half thousand different assets on Highspot, and so we did a complete content audit. We removed the stuff that we didn’t need that needed to be archived. That was just, I think it was, was three groups. It was remove, archive, update and keep. Something like that. A key thing for me on the next phase was on the user, the more of a visual experience. Ours was good. It was a little bit more out of the box and I feel we working with some of our internal brand teams, we could prove that to be a little bit more similar to some of the other partner experiences that our partners have. On some of the other portals that we have, just a partner portal, a partner center, our partner hub. And so we work to bring in some of those brand elements from Meta and WhatsApp and our different platforms into Highspot. We’re able to do that with one of our partners. And then the last thing we did was test, though we updated our content. I’m a big stickler for content naming and having a really strong naming taxonomy and nomenclature around how you name your content. And if you ask my team or the team that we work with, I’m always pushing the team. If there’s something, if there’s an asset that’s, that I feel is not named correctly, people aren’t gonna click on that. So what’s the point of even building that asset if it’s not named correctly? People need to be really understand what they’re getting themselves into when they click on an asset. And so we did our content audit. We update a lot of our content. We renamed almost every single asset once we had archived. A lot of the assets rebuilt the design of our complete Highspot experience. We had different groupings, different categories, and then again, we had partnered as part of this journey. So we tested this with partners and we said, hey, if we had this, what do you think? A lot of these were just workshops with partners moving certain things around saying, hey, if we put this here, does that work? We put this here, does that work? And then we launched, we soft launched, I think to about 20% of our partners, we saw some good results and then we, we had launched for everyone else. I mean, we saw an initial spike straight away when we launched because we’ve completely redesigned high spot and it’s great experience and you’re gonna get a lot of people organically come in and say, hey, I wonder what this is about. So we saw a spike in the first two weeks, but after that, that’s when we started. We saw the drop after the spike, and then we saw the gradual. And importantly for us, we wanted partners that don’t visit us at all to start visiting our Highspot experience. We wanted more people within our partners visiting Highspot as well. And so eventually over the six months, we started seeing like a really steady, nice, gradual ramp up. And then some of our other metrics, the time spent on HighSpot, the number of things that they’re downloading, number of things that they’re opening, so views, a lot of these started improving. The challenge now is that now we’re getting really strong adoption on Highspot. We’re starting to see teams wanting to upload more and more content on it because we’re starting to see the value of a lot of the foundational work that we’ve done. And so whilst we don’t, obviously we don’t gate content, but we do wanna make sure that everything that’s uploaded. Is super intentional and is aligned with the risk of enablement program that we have. So it’s a good problem to have. SS: Absolutely. That is a great problem to have. And so, aside from some traffic, and you did talk about a couple other key metrics, but I’d love to understand, how do you think about the metrics that you need in order to continue to measure and optimize your channel enablement strategy. JS: If you’re kind of first principles that, and think about why do we have Highspot experience in the first place to enable our partner ecosystem. We have a partner ecosystem within business messaging which is evolving and growing. We’re expanding to, if you say we have about 12 different types of partners in their ecosystem, we’ve got really strong activation with. Probably a quarter of them. And we’re now focusing on evolving our partner ecosystem into the rest. And so our partner marketing goals are always aligned to our partner ecosystem goals and our channel goals in general. And then with end partner marketing, our enablement goals are aligned with what our channel strategy is. And so right now what we’re focusing on is ensuring that as we expand our private ecosystem to new and different type of partners. When they’re ready for enablement, we start taking them into that learn phase of the learner grow model. That experience is really positive for them, and it’s almost a page turner type experience where they’re really excited to move into the next phase, or really excited to be shown a different asset or for another asset to be uploaded and email to them and say, hey, you think you’re really like this? And so really key for me is ensuring that whatever, whatever I’m doing, whatever my team’s doing, is aligned completely to a partner ecosystem strategy. SS: I love that. And do you have some wins that you might be able to share? What are some of the initial business results that you’ve seen on Highspot specifically? JS: Look, I don’t have the numbers off the top of my head, but there were two things that we wanted to do. We wanted more partners, more net new partners on it, so partners that spend zero time on it and we can see from our dashboards that we build, I wanted to see more partners on it. ’cause that for me was, and they’ve been enabled on a Highspot before. They’ve got access, they’ve got a license, they know how to use it. They’re just not using it. And so for me, that was a real win to start seeing Partner X that hasn’t visited Highspot in three months to start seeing them, oh, hey, we’ve got one person from Partner X now in Highspot last month, and now I’ve got two people. The average time they spend on the platform was 60 seconds. Now it’s three minutes. Now it’s six minutes. But that was a great personal win for me because that’s almost, for me, that was proving them wrong. Initially, they had probably visited it and not enjoyed the experience, and in their mind it was something that I didn’t really need. And so for me to be able to turn that around with that team and rebuild the experience of them to say, oh, it’s actually pretty good now, that was a really great win for me because that’s turning a detractor into an advocate, which is just, just a, a great personal goal to have. And the second thing is starting to see people, I suppose we’re seeing people spend more time on it. We’ve got a hypothesis around why they spend more time on it is because we’ve got less content on there. Now, I don’t know exactly how many assets, but it’s not, it’s not close to 6,000 anymore, but there’s less assets on there. So the discoverability is far better. They can find the assets that they want. When they go into the search field and they search for something, they don’t come up with 40 different assets. It’s 12, which is manageable. And so they’re spending more time within those assets. So now we see new partners using it and existing partners using it more and better. The two things that we focus on, we’re seeing those move up into the right, which is great. We wanna start looking into different sorts of measures of success. This year we are looking into, you know, again, as I mentioned with the part ecosystem, how do we launch to a new partner type? Which is new, and so we haven’t done that yet. On Highspot, we had a bunch of partners already enabled on business messaging through a different portal. Then when we adopted Highspot, we moved them to there. But we’re gonna start looking at things like sharing. We’ve recently started using digital sales rooms, which is something that we didn’t do last year, and we’re testing about five to six different things with digital sales rooms. That’s a really powerful feature. We haven’t figured out exactly where, where the superpower is for us to use digital sales rooms. But once our pilots are finished, we’ll probably have a hypothesis there. But yeah, I think the metric for us this year is we know our partner numbers are gonna still go up and into the right. It’s gonna slow down a little bit our growth, but we know we’re in the right direction. So our other measure for success is how do we deepen our partner’s experience with Highspot? We know we’ve only scratched the surface of what Highspot can do for us. So we’re looking into what are the other things that we need to do, and also importantly, how do we connect the Highspot experience with some of our other tools that we have, and starting to integrate it more into the partner experience that we have versus a standalone CMS, which a little bit it is of now, but I know that’s something we’re working on with your team. SS: I love that. Jason, last question for you, and I don’t think we could. Get away from talking about AI these days. It’s everywhere. And at the conference you were at last fall, I know you were excited about some of the AI innovation that we, we showcased there, but I’d love to hear from you, how are you starting to envision AI playing a role in further enhancing your channel partner enablement strategy moving forward? JS: I mean, the buzzword of the year, right? It’s a little bit hard right now. We’ve just finished our foundational rebuild of Highspot, and we’re at a really comfortable stage with what we’ve delivered to our partners and the operations around it, including, you know, governance. Measurement content, strategy, et cetera, like when a really good spot there. I think there are some operating models around AI that make sense for our partners to want to lean in towards. When you talk about enablement, which we’re at different stages of exploring, I think the most powerful one would be how do we get the right content? It comes down to timeliness and relevance as we spoken at the start. How do we get the right content to the right partner at the right time? And so that’s more generative content enablement, if you will. And that’s tough because you need, you need sort of metadata to support that. But I think if you were to ask our partners what’s the main thing that they would want from AI and channel enablement or partner enablement, it would be, hey, be really useful instead of me looking for the, the asset for you to actually know that I need this asset right now or group of assets. I think that would be the main thing that they would want. And I get it. So we’ll get to that stage at some point. But right now we’re, we’re definitely focused on maintaining our strong grassroots and foundations right now, and then looking at more sort of piecemeal. Additions to that. So things like digital sales rooms, things like making it easier for them to be able to share content with their end clients on the go, which is one of the ask that they’ve sent from us. And so those are the few things that we’re focused on this year. SS: I love it. Jason, thank you again so much for joining our podcast today. I truly appreciate you sharing your insights and experience. JS: Of course. It’s been great. Thanks a lot, Shawnna. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win-Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

Our man in Beijing, North Asia correspondent Will Glasgow, unpacks how Chinese President Xi has mishandled the tariff war, and how it can possibly be resolved. Find out more about The Front podcast here. You can read about this story and more on The Australian's website or on The Australian’s app. This episode of The Front is presented by Claire Harvey, produced by Kristen Amiet and edited by Tiffany Dimmack. Our team includes Lia Tsamoglou, Joshua Burton, Stephanie Coombes and Jasper Leak, who also composed our music.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fintechs have pushed the industry to focus on client experiences, and our show today digs into how traditional banks can collaborate with global banks like Citi to improve experiences like cross border payments for their clients. In our conversation today, Aashish Mishra, Citi's Global Head for Banks sales and North Asia head for Financial Institutions and Fintech Sales, Treasury & Trade Solutions (TTS), dives into how the bank's 24/7 US dollar clearing business, as well as solutions like Worldlink ® Payment Services, are helping the firm's bank clients deliver modern and intuitive experiences to its customers. Aashish Mishra is part of Citi's Services' business based in Hong Kong, and he performs two roles: he's responsible for TTS sales and strategy for all FI client segments in North America, which spans banks, fintechs, insurance, asset managers, and broker dealers. And for the bank segment globally, his focus is on delivering the entire TTS solution set to his clients, including cash clearing, global payments and receivables, Banking as a Service, liquidity solutions and trade solutions. Prior to this role, he spent extensive time in Citi's Security Services business, including as the Head of Custody Product and Head of Direct Custody and Clearing business for Asia.  Aashish has extensive experience in the financial institution space, and has worked closely with senior clients, regulators, and financial market infrastructure during his career. Today, he brings that insight from multiple arms of the vast Citi footprint to the show to explore how banks can push their products further without burdening their teams with technical lift, as well as where he expects client expectations to go in the future.

This week on The Fin podcast, North Asia correspondent Jessica Sier and motoring writer Tony Davis on Tesla’s challenges, the rise of BYD and whether a five-minute battery charge could be the real game changer.This podcast is sponsored by Aussie Broadband.Further reading: BYD overtakes Tesla to secure pole position in EV raceThe Chinese electric carmaker’s latest full-year financial results reveal the extent of this power shift, with it surpassing the $US100 billion revenue mark.Tesla’s new strategy as sales fall: Openness (but don’t mention Musk)The Cybertruck is being shown off at a Sydney expo and executives are free to speak for the first time in years as Tesla takes a new tack amid falling sales.Trump tariffs deliver body blow to Japan’s auto industryAfter embracing the return of a once staunch ally, Japan’s car makers now find themselves on the front line of the trade war despite huge investments in the US.NEWSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of China Field Notes, Scott Kennedy speaks with Kent Kedl on his 40-year journey in China from teaching English to consulting for multinational companies. They explore the past and present challenges foreign companies face in China, including understanding its regulations and adapting business strategies to local markets, how scenario planning is critical for navigating uncertainties, discuss his experiences during the pandemic lockdown in Shanghai, and the role of humor in processing new experiences, including in China. Kent Kedl is the founder and managing partner at Blue Ocean Advisors, a risk and strategy advisory firm based in Shanghai. Kent has consulted with multinational and Asia-based corporations on a range of issues, such as geopolitical risk, M&A and organic growth strategy, crisis management and organizational development programs. He was previously the Managing Partner for Control Risks' Greater China and North Asia practice and, prior to that, was a partner with Technomic Asia, a market strategy consulting firm. Kent has worked as a journalist and is a frequent contributor to Asia-based media outlets. Kent has been working across Asia and living in China for nearly forty years.

Last night, in a shock televised announcement, South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol declared emergency martial law.  It sent some South Koreans running to their homes, to be with their families. Unsure of what this move would mean. While many others fled to the National Assembly, in protest, even as police and the military surrounded the country's parliament. In a bonus episode today, North Asia correspondent Lisa Visentin, on how this bizarre situation unfolded and why such an extreme measure was deployed by the president. Audio thanks to: South Korea crisis - President lifts martial law in humiliating U-turn. BBC News. South Korea President Yoon says he will lift martial law. BBC News. Subscribe to The Age & SMH: https://subscribe.smh.com.au/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Photo:  1903 Japan Bus No known restrictions on publication. #PRC Japan: #ROK: Present Biden Administration uccess in North Asia. Josh Rogin https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/22/biden-south-korea-japan-summit-china/

Photo:  1920 Imperial Hotel Tokyo No known restrictions on publication. @Batchelorshow #ROK: #Japan. Unexpected and unprecedented alliance in North Asia. David Maxwell, FDD. @GordonGChang, Gatestone, Newsweek, The Hill. David Maxwell, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and senior fellow at the Global Peace Foundation,  https://www.reuters.com/world/us-south-korea-japan-agree-crisis-consultations-camp-david-summit-2023-08-18/