My friend Andrew had the club at the top of his backswing on the 10th tee. He stopped, put it down, and turned around. "You've been here two years. What's changed the most through your eyes?"
I have been working in the Asia Pacific region since 1987. I have lived in the Philippines for two.
I gave him the easy answer first. More flights, better airports, more cranes, more traffic than the roads were built for.
Then I gave him the real one. Not much here has changed. Asia is doing what it was doing when I arrived in 2024, and for a long time before that, only more of it and faster. What's changed in two years is happening everywhere else.
A new war in the Middle East. A second Trump term. Inflation that stopped being temporary, debt nobody intends to repay, interest rates that have locked a generation out of the housing market, and birth rates quietly running the wrong way. AI went from a tool for early adopters to a tool for everyone, and the argument moved from whether it works to how we can live with it.
Asia has its own list, and it is long. Governance, infrastructure, energy, water, health, food, plus the effort of moving goods around quickly. None of it is small.
But these are the problems of a region still building. The wealthier end of the corridor has the problems of a region trying to hold on to what it already built.
We are 26 years into the Asian Century. A quarter of it has gone. Most of the entrepreneurs I talk to are still treating it as a slogan.
PS. More from the corridor here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidthomas-asia/
