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Tony Tan Caktiong
Born
Philippines, fast food. Tan Caktiong opened an ice cream parlour in Cubao in 1975, added hot meals when customers asked for them, and turned it into Jollibee. Rather than copy American chains, Jollibee tuned its menu to Filipino tastes, with sweet-style spaghetti and its Chickenjoy fried chicken, and beat McDonald's in its home market. It later followed Filipino workers abroad, opening where the diaspora lived.
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Henry Sy
Born
Philippines, retail and property. Sy started with a small shoe shop in Manila in 1958 and built the SM group around giant air-conditioned malls that became the public square of Filipino cities: places to shop, eat, attend Mass, pay bills and escape the heat. Owning the malls, the department stores inside them and later a bank let each part feed the others. He died in 2019.
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Socorro Ramos
Born
Philippines, bookselling. Ramos and her husband opened a small shop on Escolta in Manila in the early 1940s, and she built it into National Book Store, the country's dominant bookseller. Her model paired books with school and office supplies, which brought families in every term, and relied on hard bargaining with suppliers to keep prices low. Known as Nanay Coring, she became a symbol of thrifty Filipino retail.
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John Gokongwei
Born
Philippines, snacks and airlines. Gokongwei began as a teenage market trader in Cebu after his father died, then built Universal Robina into a maker of cheap snacks and drinks under the Jack 'n Jill name. In 1996 his group launched Cebu Pacific and later turned it into a low-fare airline, making domestic flights affordable in an archipelago where ferries were the alternative. He died in 2019.
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Dhanin Chearavanont
Born
Thailand, food and retail. Dhanin grew Charoen Pokphand, his family's Bangkok seed shop, into an integrated food company: CP supplies feed and chicks to contract farmers, buys back the birds, processes them and sells the food. In 1989 he brought 7-Eleven to Thailand, giving CP a nationwide shop network for its own products. CP was also one of the first foreign investors in China's Shenzhen special economic zone.
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Robert Kuok
Born
Malaysia, commodities and hotels. Kuok earned the name Sugar King by trading and refining sugar across Asia from the 1950s, building a regional network of mills, plantations and trading offices. He then used those relationships to open Shangri-La hotels from 1971. His model was the cross-border Chinese-Southeast Asian trading house: close relationships, careful logistics and patient diversification.
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Tony Fernandes
Born
Malaysia, aviation. Fernandes, a former music industry executive, and his partners bought the loss-making AirAsia in 2001 for a token sum and its debts, then rebuilt it on the low-cost model: one aircraft type, fast turnarounds, online booking and fares cheap enough to compete with buses. Under the slogan "Now everyone can fly", it became one of Asia's largest budget carriers, though the pandemic forced a painful restructuring.
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Anthony Tan
Malaysia and Singapore, transport and delivery. Tan, from a Malaysian car-making family, launched MyTeksi in Kuala Lumpur in 2012 to make taxis safer to hail, and it became Grab. Unlike Uber, Grab accepted cash, added motorbike taxis and adapted to each country, then layered food delivery and payments on top. It bought Uber's Southeast Asian business in 2018. Tan remains chief executive.
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Forrest Li
Singapore, games and e-commerce. Li founded Garena in 2009 to publish online games in Southeast Asia, then used the cash from its hit Free Fire, designed to run on cheap phones, to fund Shopee, launched in 2015, and the payments arm SeaMoney. Games paying for a loss-making marketplace until it reached scale is an unusual cross-subsidy, and Shopee became the region's leading online shop.
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Sim Wong Hoo
Singapore, hardware. Sim founded Creative Technology in 1981 in a Singapore shophouse, and its Sound Blaster card of 1989 became the standard for sound on IBM-compatible PCs, a rare case of a Southeast Asian company setting a global technical standard. Creative later struggled against Apple in portable music. He died in 2023.
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William Tanuwijaya
Born
Indonesia, online marketplace. Tanuwijaya, from a small town in North Sumatra, co-founded Tokopedia in 2009 as a free place for small Indonesian sellers to open online shops, earning from services rather than charging merchants to list. It became one of the country's largest marketplaces, merged with Gojek in 2021 to form GoTo, and in 2024 TikTok took a majority stake to combine it with TikTok Shop.
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Ferry Unardi
Born
Indonesia, travel. Unardi co-founded Traveloka in 2012 after struggling to book flights home from the United States. Because few Indonesians had credit cards, Traveloka let customers pay by bank transfer, at ATMs or in cash at convenience stores, and kept customer service in Bahasa Indonesia around the clock. It grew into Southeast Asia's largest online travel agency.
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Nguyễn Thị Phương Thảo
Born
Vietnam, aviation. Nguyễn Thị Phương Thảo, who made her first money trading goods in Moscow as a student, co-founded Vietjet, which began flying in 2011 as Vietnam's first private low-cost airline. Cheap fares on domestic routes turned flying into an option for workers and students who had taken long-distance buses and trains, and Vietjet overtook the state carrier in domestic passengers.
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Phạm Nhật Vượng
Born
Vietnam, property and cars. Phạm Nhật Vượng made his first fortune in Ukraine in the 1990s with Mivina instant noodles, then returned home to build Vingroup. Its model is to build whole urban districts with their own schools, hospitals and shops, then use the profits to enter new industries, most ambitiously VinFast, a Vietnamese car and electric vehicle maker. It is a high-risk bet on a national champion.
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Trương Gia Bình
Vietnam, technology services. Trương Gia Bình, a mathematician, co-founded FPT in 1988 as a state research company and turned it into Vietnam's largest private technology group. Its distinctive move was software outsourcing for Japanese clients, training engineers in Japanese, and later founding its own university to supply staff. FPT shows a Vietnamese route into global services that does not depend on English-speaking markets.
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