ASEAN Business Leaders to Meet in Singapore

More than 300 business leaders from across the ASEAN region will converge on Singapore to attend the ASEAN Business Club (ABC) Forum 2014 on 8 and 9 September.

The leaders will address concerns on the ASEAN region’s readiness for an integrated economic region under the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) initiative, the corporate sector’s expectations and challenges to AEC, which is set to come into effect on 31 December 2015.

The forum will be held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Singapore.

ASEAN Business Club Advisory Council member and AirAsia Group CEO Tan Sri Tony Fernandes will chair the forum.

Lim Hng Kiang, Minister of Trade and Industry of Singapore, will be the guest of honor at the forum.

The forum will focus primarily on six sectors: 1) Legal and Tax; 2) Automotive and Manufacturing; 3) Financial Services and Capital Markets; 4) Minerals, Oil and Gas; 5) Food and Agriculture; and 6) Retail.

Discussions in the forum will be included in the ASEAN Business Club’s “Lifting-the-Barriers” reports on each of the sectors, and the reports – which will highlight industry barriers and bottlenecks as well as propose solutions – will be delivered on a later date to ASEAN officials, all economic ministers in the region and the media.

Independent research partners Frost & Sullivan, AT Kearney, ZicoLaw, Ernst & Young, Bain & Company and Accenture are spearheading research for the reports.

With the forum, the ASEAN Business Club aims to promote sector-based discussions to enhance the ASEAN agenda. It seeks to help better prepare the ASEAN region’s business community for AEC, which will establish a single market and production base by 2015. It also aims to help attract more investments in the region, initiate reforms, prepare the work force for market integration and improve the region’s competitiveness alongside neighboring economic giants China, Japan and India.

The ASEAN Business Club is a fully private sector-driven initiative that serves as a forum for ASEAN’s top business leaders to network, collaborate and play a leading role in the process of ASEAN economic integration.

ABC members include some of the most prominent business leaders in the region, including council members Nazir Razak, Tony Fernandes, Patrick Walujo, Chairul Tanjung, Chartsiri Sophonpanich, Tos Chirathivat, Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala, Cezar Consing, Chew Gek Khim, Goh Yew Lin and Thura K. Ko.

The forum is organized by the ASEAN Business Club and the CIMB ASEAN Research Institute (CARI), a public organization committed to the development of the ASEAN Economic Community and which serves as the secretariat of the ASEAN Business Club.

This year’s forum is sponsored by Silverlake Axis, DBS Bank and CIMB.