Consumer brands across Southeast Asia and global e-commerce hubs face an unforgiving mathematical reality in their paid media accounts. Customer acquisition costs across Meta, TikTok, and Google climbed between 60 and 80 per cent over the past 18 months, while the conversion efficiency of traditional influencer sponsorships collapsed. For years, marketing teams wired guaranteed upfront […] The post Why social commerce seeding is replacing upfront influencer retainers appeared first on e27.

CPF Ordinary Account pays 2.5 per cent, and Singaporeans queue for Treasury bills when yields rise. So when anyone quotes a 20 per cent annual percentage yield on stablecoins, a sensible person should ask one question first: who is paying it, and why? I ask because I once paid for not asking. In 2022, I […] The post A 20% stablecoin APY may be less magical than it sounds appeared first on e27.

A Singapore-based education financing programme is testing whether income-linked funding can widen access to higher education without an unmanageable debt burden, a model analysts say could help ease repayment pressure faced by graduates across Southeast Asia. Global Financing for Education’s (GFE) Pay It Forward scheme, publicly launched in September, provides students with funding for their education in return for 3 to 10 per cent of their subsequent income for one to 10 years. The...

A new beauty brand no longer needs to look much like a traditional beauty company. It does not need its own factory, a large product-development department or a nationwide retail network. Specialist manufacturers can formulate, produce and package cosmetics for outside brands, while e-commerce provides access to customers without building physical distribution from scratch. AI […] The post Why AI could unbundle the beauty industry appeared first on e27.

A founder pitched me earlier this year on his semiconductor company. The deck was clean. The market was real. The technology was genuinely differentiated. The Singapore entity was properly incorporated, the cap table looked orderly, and the revenue was growing. Then I asked him three questions. Where does your intellectual property legally sit? Who owns […] The post The cross-border due diligence questions most founders cannot answer appeared first on e27.

American rapper Macklemore lost his spot on British pop star Ed Sheeran’s US tour after speaking up for Palestinians, but in Malaysia it was Sheeran’s music which ended up being pulled from the airwaves. In neighbouring Singapore, British band Massive Attack faced a different kind of fallout, barred from returning after members displayed a Palestinian flag during a July concert. The contrasting cases highlight the competing pressures on foreign artists in Southeast Asia, where political...

A Vietnamese pro-democracy organisation has alleged that two of its members, who hold Norwegian and Australian citizenship, were abducted in Cambodia and taken to the border with Vietnam, where Hanoi authorities later accused them of illegally entering the country. Vietnam has charged the two men, along with a third alleged member of the organisation, with terrorism and document forgery, saying they were caught crossing the border from Cambodia with forged identity documents. The organisation,...

Anthropic has told prospective investors that it is growing at a pace few companies have matched, losing money at a scale few could survive, and building a product that could pose an existential threat to humanity. The prospectus behind what could become the largest IPO on record shows revenue rising twelvefold to nearly US$4.6 billion in 2025, […] The post Ecosystem Roundup: Anthropic’s IPO filing: 12x revenue, US$8B loss and an extinction risk appeared first on e27.

The Philippines is preparing to give its coastguard more responsibilities in the contested South China Sea even as the agency faces a more basic problem: whether it has enough ships, aircraft and personnel to carry them out. The proposed overhaul comes as the coastguard is being stretched by increasingly demanding operations around Philippine-claimed waters, while funding constraints threaten to limit its ability to keep its existing assets at sea. That tension is evident in the 2027 budget. The...

A 30-year-old man was charged on Tuesday over an AI-generated image of a crocodile at Pandan Reservoir in Singapore that prompted authorities to search for the reptile and suspend water activities there. Ye Lin, a Myanmar national, was handed two charges – one count of communicating a false message and one count of obstructing the course of justice. Speaking through an interpreter, he told the court that he intended to plead guilty, and would not be engaging a lawyer. On August 20, Ye Lin...