APAC CEOs Must Turn Geopolitical Fragmentation Into Competitive Edge

According to BCG’s Asia-Pacific chair, the constant churn of tariffs, fuel price spikes and power-grid unreliability has turned disruption into a lasting feature of the business environment. He urges CEOs to move beyond optimizing for one market and adopt a “China+1”-style approach that spreads manufacturing and high-value components across China, Japan, Korea or Taiwan while using ASEAN for labor-intensive assembly and expanding final-product localisation into India and other growth hubs.

The rise of sovereign-wealth and domestic funding pools now offers new avenues for intraregional mergers and capital diversification, though firms must balance breadth with deep relationships. A robust geopolitical risk function that feeds policy insights into core strategy, especially around energy security, is also essential. Together, operational flexibility, diversified financing and proactive risk management form an integrated resilience model that can turn fragmentation into a growth catalyst.