Twelve doors out: Southeast Asia's exits are back, and the buyers are flying in

There are two ways out of a company in Southeast Asia. One of them is loud. On 20 October, GCash will ring the bell at the Philippine Stock Exchange in the biggest listing that country has ever done. Cornerstone investors with names like BlackRock and T. Rowe Price. A valuation that starts with a number most Filipino founders will never see in their lifetime. The other is quiet. A few weeks earlier, on 8 September, private equity firm Navis Capital closed the sale of a chain of premium Malaysian supermarkets, Village Grocer, Ben’s Independent Grocer and a few others, to a Thai retailer. No bell. No cameras. Just a wire transfer and, reportedly, around five times the money they put in more than a decade ago. For years the complaint about this region was that there were no exits. Great companies, nowhere to sell them. That complaint just stopped being true. The door is cracking open. But before anyone pops the champagne, walk through it with me and look at who is standing on the other side. Because it is almost never a Southeast Asian. One. Six and a half times the money, four more companies Here is the number that made me put this on the docket. In the first half of this year, venture-backed companies in Southeast Asia returned $5.65 billion in exits, per DealStreetAsia. Trade sales, listings, the lot. In the first half of last year, that figure was $856 million. Call it a six and a half times jump in twelve months. Hear only that and you would think the drought is over, and the region has finally figured out how to give investors their money back. Here is the part that gets buried. That $5.65 billion came from twelve exits. Twelve. The year before, it was eight. The value went up more than six times. The number of companies actually getting out went up by four. Sit with that, because it is the whole story of this market right now. The money is real. The breadth is a mirage. Twelve companies is not a wave of liquidity. Twelve companies is a handful of very large outcomes, and everybody else is still sitting in the waiting room. We saw the same trick with funding. The region raised $7.25 billion in the first half, the strongest since 2022. Sounds fantastic, until you notice that deal volume fell to its lowest level since at least 2018, and a single data centre deal carried the headline. Strip that one out and regional funding actually fell. The median Series A cheque shrank. The average founder is not living in the record. The average founder is living in the drought. *When you see “exits are back” or “funding hits a record,” your first question is always the same. How many deals?* Two. The loud door, and who already has a key The public market. The listing. The dream. And in the Philippines, that dream is about to come true in a very big way. GCash, the wallet on almost every Filipino phone, is going public through its parent, Mynt. The offer could raise around 80 billion pesos, roughly $1.4 billion, and closer to $1.6 billion with the overallotment. At the top of the range, Mynt is worth 669 billion pesos, about $11.5 billion. It is the largest listing in the history of the Philippine Stock Exchange, and it beats the old record, Monde Nissin, comfortably. More than 20 cornerstone investors are in, BlackRock and T. Rowe Price among them. The offer period opens on 6 October. Trading starts on the 20th. I want to be genuinely positive here, because this matters and I am on record as bullish on the Philippines. For a decade, the knock on Manila was that it could not host a listing like this. Any serious technology company would have to go to Singapore or New York to find money deep enough. GCash is proving that wrong on home soil. That is a real milestone, and Filipino founders should take a moment with it. Then I put the investor hat back on and read the cap table out loud, because Real. Raw. Relatable. means I do not just clap at big numbers. GCash is not a scrappy startup three friends built in a Makati garage. Mynt is a joint venture between Globe Telecom and the Ayala group, one of the most powerful families in the country, and Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of China’s Alibaba. The anchor buyers flying in are the giant American asset managers. So the biggest technology listing in Philippine history is, honestly described, a telco and a Chinese fintech giant selling a slice of their joint venture to Wall Street. That is not a criticism of the deal. It is a great deal, and GCash is a great company. It is a question about the pattern. If the only way to a landmark listing is to already be owned by a conglomerate and a foreign tech giant before you start, what exactly does that prove for the founder with no conglomerate behind them? Across the region in the first half, there were 47 listings raising about $3 billion. Healthy on paper. But reliable public liquidity for a venture-backed technology company still exists on a very short list of exchanges. Malaysia will point out that Bursa has been busy, and SkyeChip showed a local chip designer can list at home. Fair. It is still the exception. For most of the region, the loud door is not actually on offer. *The public door is open. Just notice how narrow it is, and who already has a key.* Three. The quiet door is a grocery aisle Most exits here do not happen with a bell and the start of public trading. They happen with a strategic buyer writing a cheque and quietly absorbing your company. Trade sales are the workhorse. And the clearest picture of this entire market I have seen is a story about groceries. Back to Navis. More than a decade ago, they started putting together a group of premium Malaysian supermarkets under a company called The Food Purveyor: Village Grocer, Ben’s Independent Grocer, BSC Fine Foods and a couple of others. This month they closed the sale for about RM1.66 billion. Good outcome, clean exit, the kind of return that keeps a fund alive. The buyer? CP Axtra, the Thai company that runs Lotus’s. And this is where one deal stops being one deal and starts being a pattern, because this is not the first time CP has gone shopping in Malaysia. Rewind to 2020. CP Group bought Tesco’s entire business in Thailand and Malaysia for $10.6 billion, one of the biggest deals in Asia that year. The Malaysian piece alone was valued at around $3 billion. Seventy-four Tesco stores were rebranded as Lotus’s. Follow the timeline. In 2020, CP buys the value end of the market, the big hypermarkets. In 2026, CP buys the premium end, the shops where the affluent city crowd does its weekly run. Put them together and one Thai conglomerate now has more than 120 outlets across Malaysia, covering everyone from the most price-sensitive shopper to the most comfortable. Top to bottom. The whole aisle. And it is not only CP. The other big premium chain in Malaysia is Jaya Grocer. Grab bought a majority of it at the end of 2021, in a deal reported at RM1.5 to 1.8 billion, roughly $400 million. Grab is a Singapore company. Some Malaysians will argue that point with me, and I am going to keep calling it Singaporean anyway. So let me say the thing plainly. Malaysia’s two leading premium supermarket chains are now both foreign-owned. One Thai, one Singaporean. Malaysian operators and Malaysian investors built these businesses into category leaders, and when it was time to sell, the buyer flew in from Bangkok or Singapore. Each time. *That is the exit market in one shopping trip. You build it here. You sell it there.* Four. The pattern holds in tech Widen out from groceries and the data backs it up. In the first half, technology M&A in the region fell to 41 deals, down 37% on the year before, according to DealStreetAsia. So even while exit value went up, the number of tech deals went down. Fewer transactions, bigger cheques. The same concentration we started with. And who did the deals that did happen? Foreign buyers completed 30 of the 41. Nearly three in four. Domestic acquirers managed eleven. Japanese corporates, Chinese groups, regional conglomerates like CP: they are the ones clearing the market while local buyers sit on their hands. One more piece, the least glamorous and the most telling. A growing share of what gets counted as an exit here is not really an exit at all. It is one private equity fund selling to another. By some estimates, secondaries are now around 30% of exit value in the region. Funds are getting older. Their LPs want some money back. There is no strategic buyer and no open listing window. So the asset goes to the fund down the street, and everyone calls it liquidity. That is a perfectly respectable strategy. Secondaries are a well-worn path in more mature markets. But put the whole board together. Exit value is up, yes. But the deals are few, they skew large, they are increasingly bought by companies headquartered outside the region, and a big chunk of what is left is just capital rotating between funds. Five. The constraint was never capital The old complaint was that Southeast Asia had no exits. That was never quite right. The truer version, the one I want you to take away, is this: the constraint here was never capital. There has always been money. The constraint is liquidity, the ability to actually turn a company into cash. And the person most able to give you that liquidity today does not live here. Six. What I would actually do with this I do not like diagnosing and walking away. So if you are a founder or an early investor in this region, here is what I would do. 1\. Build for a specific strategic buyer, and be honest with yourself about who they are. If you are building a consumer brand in Malaysia or Indonesia, your most likely exit is a regional conglomerate or a foreign strategic, not a listing. Know that on day one. Know their names. Build the thing they will eventually need to own, because buying you is faster than building you. 2\. Stop worshipping the listing. The GCash IPO is a beautiful, rare event. It is not your path. For almost every company here, the realistic door is a trade sale, and there is no shame in that. A five times return in a quiet sale to a Thai retailer spends exactly the same as a bell on an exchange. 3\. Sit with the uncomfortable question. If you care about this region beyond your own cheque, the grocery story should bother you. When the value end and the premium end of an entire national category both end up owned from outside the country, where is the domestic champion ever supposed to come from? The bow Foreign capital validating our companies is a good thing. Foreign capital owning every company that gets good is a different thing. I do not have a clean answer for that. But we should stop pretending it is not happening. The headline this quarter is that exits are back. They are, and the value is real. Just remember, every time you see that number, to ask two things. How many companies? And where did the buyer fly in from? Twelve doors, mostly foreign on the other side. That is the market we are actually in. So tell me where I am wrong. If you think foreign buyers are the best thing that ever happened to this region, I genuinely want to hear it, because the pushback is usually where the next episode starts. And if you know a founder quietly assuming an IPO is their ending, send them this. They probably need to hear about the quiet door. This piece accompanies this week’s episode of SEA of Startups. Real. Raw. Relatable. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, and subscribe to the newsletter at seaofstartups.substack.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seaofstartups.substack.com