Ten years ago, Google, Temasek and Bain & Company predicted that Southeast Asia’s digital economy would reach $200 billion by 2025. The region not only met this goal, but significantly exceeded it.
The e-Conomy SEA 2025 report shows that the region’s gross merchandise value (GMV) is now heading in the right direction to exceed $300 billion this 12 months, 1.5 times higher than the unique forecast made a decade ago. Over the past ten years, the regional company’s GMV has grown 7.4 times and revenues 11.2 times.
Regional business GMV reached $263 billion in 2024, up 15% from the previous 12 months, while profitability increased to $11 billion, a 2.5-fold increase from 2022. But beneath this seemingly regular growth lies a far more uneven story whenever you take a look at the information by country.
Who’s leading: It’s not nearly scale
Indonesia continues to dominate when it comes to volume. The country’s digital economy will reach $100 billion in 2025, up 14% from the previous 12 months and double-digit growth across all sectors: e-commerce, online travel, media, transportation and food services. However, leadership in scale doesn’t all the time translate into leadership in quality of growth.
Singapore, despite its much smaller scale, leads in one other dimension. The country has secured $1.31 billion in private AI funding, the best among the many six major Southeast Asian economies, with AI investment increasing by 55% in a single semester.
Over the past 12 months, over $2.3 billion has been invested in over 680 AI startups across the region, representing over 30% of total private funding in the primary half of 2025. Most of those AI startups are based in Singapore.
Growth engines: e-commerce and artificial intelligence as the idea
E-commerce has develop into a significant growth driver, with transaction value estimated at $185 billion by 2025. One of the important thing drivers of video commerce is video commerce – purchases via live streaming and video content – which now accounts for 25% of all e-commerce transactions after growing fivefold in only three years.
In terms of digital payments, eight ASEAN countries can now conduct cross-border payments using QR codes, signaling that digital financial services aren’t any longer limited by national borders.
The implementation of artificial intelligence across the region can be well ahead of worldwide trends. Consumer interest in AI in Southeast Asia is 3 times higher than the worldwide average, with five countries – Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia – rating in the highest 20 globally in the usage of multimodal AI.
To support this growth, data center capability within the region is predicted to grow by 180% over the subsequent few years, much faster than the Asia-Pacific average of 120%.
Who’s left behind: a niche that also must be filled
In addition to the mixture data for the region, 4 countries – Brunei, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar – were included within the e-Conomy SEA report for the primary time this 12 months.
Combined, these 4 countries only account for around 2% of the region’s total GMV. Their combined digital economy is predicted to succeed in just $6 billion in 2025, with projections starting from $10 billion to $25 billion by 2030, driven primarily by e-commerce and transportation and food delivery services.
Myanmar presents perhaps probably the most complex case. Continued challenges have left the tourism sector highly depending on domestic routes. However, at the identical time, AI-based applications are growing rapidly there and in Cambodia, with revenues growing by 86% and 116% respectively.
By 2030, Southeast Asia’s entire digital economy is projected to grow to $1 trillion. Once the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement (DEFA) is fully implemented, this figure could potentially double to $2 trillion. However, it stays an open query how much of this growth will actually go to countries lagging behind.
