Southeast Asia Buzz 2025; Trump Tariffs; Thailand’s New Funding
On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump announced a set of global tariffs that make little economic sense and sent stock markets plummeting. At least they make little economic sense unless Trump and his billionaire buddies are planning to buy the dip in anticipation of a big stock market rally, but it increasingly looks like there’s no plan with this administration – just vengeance, vanity and wanton self-destruction.
Asia, in particular China and Southeast Asia, will be among the economies hardest hit by the tariffs. While it’s too early to say how this will affect the region’s content industries, many Asian consumers were already fearful about spending on leisure goods and services and the economic fallout from Trump’s tariffs is not likely to give them much more confidence.
The irony is that, with the exception of China, Asia has not protected its content industries from US domination in the streaming era and Asian companies are not exporting a huge amount of content to the US. We currently have a situation in which an American company, Netflix, has created a close to feudal content production system in several Asian countries, where local filmmakers now have few options but to toil for Netflix on local-language production, but most of the profits are flowing back to the US. It’s unclear whether these contradictions fit into Trump’s concept of a trade deficit.
Then there are the English-speaking territories, Australia and New Zealand, where US companies are producing a large volume of films and streaming series, but not investing heavily in local content. Australia has pushed back against this and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised to hold steady on plans to introduce local content rules for global streamers, despite objections from the US (Deadline’s Max Goldbart has written some analysis on potential impact of the tariffs on international industries including Australia here).
