whoknows

The whether is such bad one that my recent trips to Hanoi and KL found less people in hotels and my booking could be immediately handled. The question is that sheep effort is the typical case. Comparing with US market, ASEAN is less hit (at least from the newspaper) except for all the bad news from Singapore. Except for that, Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia are pretty well on track economically. Thailand is pretty much under the political turmoil again. 

So for the business which relies on ASEAN market, what's the right way to carry on business for next 12 to 18 months?

The first thing for most of the businessess do might be cost cutting - it's straightforward and taking immediate effect. But does that mean you are doing the right thing? If you have a $1 million worth IT system in place, probably you can cease the maintenance contract. Or even further, you can chop off some servers and applications. For trading companies, your salesmen will be probably redundant for timebeing, so Sales ERP system can be isolated. By doing so, you can see 30% cost from IT saved. However if you turn the mirror to the other side, you will be surprised to see you might lose more customers - business is more complex than a simple calculation. Your staff, partners and customers rely on your CRM, Order system and other applications to maintain their link with your organisation. Cutting the looks-like-redundant-resource will likely worsen the already bad situation. You might want to look into the implication of the change of policy/system setup etc. 

Some of my customers are facing this kind of the challenges. The delima is always to justify the value and see through the value chain. I am pretty much sure about this point.