Here’s a pattern I’ve observed: founders obsess over market size, regulatory frameworks, and capital access when exploring Gulf-ASEAN opportunities. They’ll spend weeks analyzing trade projections—$130.7 billion in 2023, potentially $757 billion by 2030—and sovereign wealth fund assets worth $6.42 trillion. Then they enter meetings in Riyadh or Dubai and wonder why promising conversations go nowhere.
As co-founder of The Gulf-ASEAN Exchange, I spend considerable time with businesses expanding across these markets. The pattern is consistent: they focus on the quantifiable—market size, trade volumes, fund assets—and underweight what’s harder to measure but more determinative of success.
The missing variable isn’t in the spreadsheet. It’s cultural intelligence, and its absence kills more deals than unfavorable terms ever will.
The Infrastructure Nobody Talks About
The 2nd ASEAN-GCC Summit in May 2025 produced another framework agreement spanning 2024-2028, with the usual commitments to trade facilitation and digital cooperation. These matter, but they’re scaffolding, not foundations.
The real infrastructure already exists at the human level. Over 26 million foreign workers operate in the GCC, with hundreds of thousands from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Myanmar. This creates something more valuable than any free trade agreement: trust networks, market intelligence channels, and cultural bridges that founders consistently underutilize.
When 780,000 Filipinos live in the UAE, they’re not just sending remittances home. They’re nodes in an information network that understands how both markets actually work. Similarly, Indonesia’s 221,000 hajj quota for 2025 represents more than religious devotion—it’s recurring seasonal movement that generates logistics demand, payment flows, and service gaps that someone needs to fill.
But recognizing opportunity and successfully executing on it require different skills. The latter demands understanding how decisions actually get made, how relationships need to be built, and what constitutes respect versus offense in business contexts you didn’t grow up in.
Where Deals Actually Break Down
Everyone fixates on the $6.42 trillion managed by ASEAN and GCC sovereign wealth funds. Founders see that number and start imagining term sheets. This misunderstands how institutional capital actually deploys.
These funds think in decades, backing infrastructure plays and strategic sectors aligned with national diversification goals. But even when a founder’s sector aligns perfectly—say, halal food supply chains or Islamic fintech—the approach matters as much as the opportunity.
Gulf business culture operates differently from Silicon Valley or Singapore’s startup ecosystem. Decision-making timelines extend longer. The role of personal relationships and trust-building precedes transactional discussions. Family offices and sovereign entities have protocols that aren’t documented in pitch deck templates.
I’ve seen this repeatedly: ASEAN founders approach Gulf counterparts with either excessive deference that undermines credibility, or Silicon Valley directness that reads as disrespectful. Neither works. The founders who succeed spend time understanding how their counterparts prefer to communicate, what signals commitment versus casual interest, and when pushing for closure helps versus when it damages relationships irreparably.
This isn’t about changing who you are. It’s about recognizing that your counterpart’s context is as valid as yours, and that successful cross-border business requires meeting somewhere in the middle with genuine respect for different operating norms.
What the Frameworks Actually Enable
The Indonesia-UAE Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement aims to grow bilateral trade from $3 billion to $10 billion by 2027. Skeptics dismiss these agreements as symbolic, but that misses their practical value.
These frameworks signal sectoral priorities to customs officials, procurement departments, and regulatory bodies. When the ASEAN-GCC agreement emphasizes halal standardization and Islamic finance, it means bureaucrats in both regions start preparing implementation guidelines. For founders, this creates a window—usually 12-18 months—where you can position before the rush.
The 2017 Philippines-Saudi labour agreement didn’t solve worker protection overnight, but it created a common language that HR tech platforms could build around. Indonesia lifting its worker placement moratorium by June 2025 opens recruitment and compliance opportunities for founders who’ve already mapped how different GCC countries interpret the new standards.
Most founders wait for perfect regulatory alignment before entering markets. Wrong move. The companies that dominate Gulf-ASEAN corridors by 2030 are building now, learning through imperfect conditions, and establishing relationships while everyone else reads framework documents.
The Mistakes Founders Keep Making
The common mistake is treating cultural understanding as secondary to business fundamentals. Founders assume that if their unit economics work and their product solves a real problem, everything else is just surface-level adaptation.
This gets the causality backwards. In cross-border expansion between emerging regions, cultural intelligence isn’t what you add after achieving product-market fit. It determines whether you achieve product-market fit at all.
Consider food security, a priority in the ASEAN-GCC framework. Solving cold chain logistics for perishable exports from Vietnam to Qatar is technically complex. But the harder problem is often understanding how procurement decisions actually get made, which relationships matter, and how to navigate situations where your local partner’s approach conflicts with your home market’s business practices.
Or take Islamic finance. Building Shariah-compliant software requires technical competence, but successfully selling it means understanding how religious sensitivities intersect with commercial objectives differently across GCC markets. What’s acceptable in one emirate may not fly in another. Those distinctions matter more than your feature list.
The founders making progress in Gulf-ASEAN corridors share a common trait: they invest time understanding their counterparts’ context before asking for commitments.
This means spending weeks in-market, not just flying in for meetings. It means asking questions about how things work and listening to answers without immediately proposing how you’d do it differently. It means recognizing that your counterpart’s risk calculations, timeline expectations, and relationship requirements come from valid business logic, even when it differs from what you’re used to.
The consistent feedback from founders and investors working across both regions is that cultural intelligence takes more time than anticipated and matters more than expected. This isn’t soft skills territory—it’s the difference between closing deals and wasting months on conversations that go nowhere. The gap between strategic intent and execution isn’t usually about lacking capital or market access—it’s about not investing enough in understanding how the other side actually operates.
Labour agreements create opportunities for HR tech and recruitment platforms. But succeeding requires understanding not just regulatory frameworks, but how employers actually hire, what workers need beyond contractual protections, and how to navigate situations where formal policies and informal practices diverge.
Cross-border business between ASEAN and the Gulf won’t be built on unicorn exits or viral growth stories. It’ll be built on sustainable businesses solving unglamorous problems—better recruitment systems, improved supply chain visibility, compliance software that reflects how things actually work, payment rails that respect both regions’ regulatory requirements.
The Gulf-ASEAN corridor will grow because fundamentals support it: complementary demographics, energy interdependence, and aligned diversification interests. But frameworks and summits won’t build the connective tissue. Founders will, one relationship at a time.
Success requires recognizing that cultural intelligence isn’t a soft skill you address after handling the “real” business fundamentals. It is a fundamental business skill. The deal terms matter. The market opportunity matters. But without genuine respect for and understanding of your counterpart’s context, you won’t get far enough to negotiate terms or capture opportunity.
For founders willing to do this work—to invest time understanding markets deeply, to approach counterparts with genuine curiosity rather than just transactional intent, to recognize that your way of doing business isn’t the only valid way—the opportunity is substantial.
The question isn’t whether the Gulf-ASEAN opportunity exists. It’s whether you’re willing to earn the right to participate in it.
