Southeast Asia’s digital boom hits the grown-up phase
- ASEAN's digital economy to surpass $300 billion by 2025
- Investor confidence rebounds with $8 billion in private funding
- Southeast Asia emerges as a global AI hotspot
Remember when Southeast Asia’s internet economy was all blitzscale and burn rate. The latest e-Conomy SEA snapshot from Google, Temasek and Bain says the region is swapping pedal-to-the-metal growth for profits, and still pointing up. Headline number first.
Gross merchandise value is on track to top $300 billion by 2025, up 7.4 times since 2016, while revenue has climbed 11.2 times. The party did not end, it just learned to pay the bar tab.
Where the money flows tells the story. Video commerce is set to grab 25% of total e-commerce GMV by 2025, which is what happens when short videos become shopping tunnels.
Digital financial services have moved past tap-to-pay into lending, wealth and insurance, and that is where investors are crowding in. Private funding rose 15% year on year to about US$8 billion, skewing to late-stage deals, with roughly half the value tied to fintech.
Adoption remains the moat. Roughly three in five people shop online, and over 60% of payments are digital. The hard stuff is scaling, too.
,Data centre capacity is projected to jump 180%, while US$2.3 billion has found its way into AI start-ups over the past year. The report reads like a victory lap for the region’s “digital decade”, with a new lap forming around AI and cross-border integration.
Hold the confetti. Profitability is still uneven, logistics and power grids remain chokepoints, and late-cycle capital expects discipline. If video shopping, fintech rails and AI infrastructure keep compounding, the US$300 billion mark is a waypoint. If not, it is a very shiny ceiling.
