Outside In | Hong Kong’s absence from list of Asia’s high-growth firms shows hard work is needed for revival

Japan, South Korea, Singapore and India were by far home to the most firms among Asia’s top 500 achieving high growth in the past three years

Hong Kong had just five firms on the list, showing the scale of the challenge as the city tries to return to the upper reaches of high-growth entrepreneurship

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Software company Animoca Brands was one of just five Hong Kong firms to make the ranking of Asia’s top 500 firms that achieved high growth during the Covid-19 pandemic. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 6:30am, 15 Apr 2023Updated: 6:50am, 15 Apr 2023

After the past three years of pandemic disruption, price volatility, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, inflation, debt overhangs inflated by sharply rising interest rates, and a growing population of zombie companies, it is a lucky company that can look you in the eye and say they are doing fine.

Even rarer are those that, over the past three years, been able to drive hyper growth. So it makes a refreshing change to plough through research published last week by the Financial Times and Statista that shines a spotlight on 500 Asian companies that have managed high growth in the past three years.

The list provides fascinating insights but also raises as many questions as it answers. One can only look in awe at Singapore’s energy groups Rex International and NW Corporation, which have managed compound growth of 630 per cent and 553 per cent respectively in the past three years, and wonder what it must have felt like to grow so splendidly while so many have scrambled to survive.

Were they just a quirk of the volatility of global energy markets, or were they doing something right that everyone could emulate? Since both companies are less than a decade old, it might be too early to tell.

Lucky or not, it would be ungracious not to recognise they must have shared enormous tenacity to fight through three years of incomparable grimness. An impressive 83 of the top 100 on the high-growth list managed a compound growth rate averaging more than 100 per cent in the traumatic period from 2020 to 2022.

HK Decoman CEO Benny Liu attends a Hong Kong Business Awards lunch at the Grand Hyatt Hotel on July 27, 2022. Photo: K.Y. Cheng

Most firms on the list are both young and small. Only 11 of the top 100 companies were in existence 10 years ago, and just two in the top 100 – Star Air in India and Intekplus in South Korea – were around 25 years ago. Just 32 out of the entire 500 high-growth list today employ more than 1,000 people, with about half of those firms based in India.

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.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}Outside In | Hong Kong’s absence from list of Asia’s high-growth firms shows hard work is needed for revival

Outside In | Hong Kong’s absence from list of Asia’s high-growth firms shows hard work is needed for revival