Expert views, founder stories and sharp analysis decoding the forces shaping Asia.
As layoffs hit 4,500 in Q2 2026, the highest since the pandemic, degree holders and mid-career professionals are bearing the brunt while support systems struggle to keep pace.
Only 22% of companies have infrastructure to support AI at scale, while individual workers rapidly adopt tools like ChatGPT and Gemini
After 26 years in Asian travel, most of them spent working alongside seasoned professionals, Lucas Pham stopped hiring them. The founder and CEO of Hanoi-based Mundo Asia Tours now recruits fresh graduates with no industry experience, trains them for two months, and watches them outperform veteran hires. He speaks to BriefAsia about his contrarian talent playbook, and about why Vietnam may be Asia’s most underrated exporter of services.
UNDP's new chief argues emerging economies need capital that serves investor interests - and that includes Beijing's Belt and Road
US Department of Energy seeks Japanese participation in AI-driven nuclear fusion and quantum computing projects
Three hotel openings in roughly ninety days mark TUI Hotels & Resorts' fastest expansion phase yet in Southeast Asia. Duc Phan, the group's Regional Business Development Director for APAC, tells BriefAsia how the partnerships got built, what TUI's integrated model delivers for owners, and why Vietnam and Cambodia now anchor its Asian ambitions.
Vietnam closed 2025 with a record 21.2 million international arrivals, and everyone in the industry agrees on the binding constraint: not rooms, not routes, but people. Elegance Hospitality Group, the Hanoi-born boutique chain whose La Siesta hotels keep beating the world’s giants in guest-voted rankings, has spent two decades building an unusual answer. Its chairman, Do Van Dan, treats service culture the way an engineer treats a structure: designed, load-tested, and measured by how it behaves when no one is watching. BriefAsia spent a morning on the floor with him.
Nguyễn Huỳnh trained as an architect, worked in branding, and then spent 40 million đồng opening a coffee shop behind a bridge in District 4. Three years, two viral explosions and more than 148,000 avoided plastic cups later, his bamboo-tube coffee brand is fielding partnership offers from five Southeast Asian countries and the United States, and still refuses to hurry. BriefAsia spoke to the 29-year-old founder about slowness, copycats, craft, and what a three-metre storefront knows that a CSR report doesn’t.
Only 22% of companies are AI-ready as hardware, security, and workflow gaps slow enterprise-scale deployment across the country
A conversation with Cong Vu, CEO of Jandec Asia, on the operational realities behind the fastest-growing corridor in Asian tourism — and why the next battle will be fought on weddings and MICE, not sightseeing packages.
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