South-East Asia’s tech firms take a battering

get enough of South-East Asia’s consumer-technology giants a year ago. This year, they have been unable to log off quickly enough. Tech firms across the region are suffering. They have been buffeted by the same forces that have sent tech stocks globally tumbling by more than 20% this year. On top of this, surging inflation and the expectation of higher interest rates have diminished the appeal of companies which aim for rapid growth in the present with reliable profits only arriving sometime in the future.South-East Asia’s giants not only have to cope with the ills besetting tech firms worldwide, but also face a “last-in-first-out” problem. The region is not a large part of the allocation of many global portfolios, and investors who piled in at the later stages of the boom may have lost their appetite. This has pushed down valuations further than the global slump. Sea, the region’s largest listed tech firm, is a case in point.