Research
Food
Fresh, frozen and the fight for the daily basket
Food is the trip generator. Whoever owns fresh in a given city owns frequency, and frequency is what makes every other category in the store work. Across Asia that ownership is being contested on three fronts at once: wet markets …
Beverages
Chilled distribution, sugar rules and the premium ladder
Beverages is a distribution business wearing a marketing costume. The brand decides whether a consumer reaches for the bottle; the cooler, the route and the fill rate decide whether the bottle is there at all. Across Asia the cate…
Housekeeping
Low-involvement, high-frequency, brutally distribution-led
Home care — laundry, dish, surface cleaners, air care, insecticides — is the category consumers think about least and retailers depend on most. It is bulky, heavily promoted, price-transparent and almost entirely won on availabili…
Personal Care
Ingredient literacy, channel fragmentation and the speed premium
Personal care is the category where Asian consumers are the most informed in the world, and that changes everything about how a brand is built. Ingredient lists are read, claims are checked, and a recommendation travels faster tha…
Pet Care
Humanisation, veterinary adjacency and a supply chain still catching up
Pet care behaves like premium personal care with a veterinary conscience attached. Ownership is rising across urban Asia, spend per animal is rising faster, and the buyer treats ingredient quality and professional endorsement as d…
Health & Pharmacy
Where regulation sets the shelf and trust sets the basket
Pharmacy is the only retail format in Asia where the law decides a large part of the assortment, the pricing and who is allowed to stand behind the counter. That makes it slow to enter, hard to discount and unusually defensible on…
Baby & Kids
A category with a birth rate problem and a premiumisation answer
Baby is the most emotionally price-inelastic basket in retail and the one with the least forgiving demographics. Births are falling across North Asia and slowing in much of Southeast Asia, so volume growth is largely gone and valu…
Fashion & Apparel
Markdown discipline, drop cadence and the return of the store
Apparel is the category where retail discipline is most visible, because every mistake shows up as a markdown. Asia carries the manufacturing base, the fastest-moving social commerce and the most price-transparent buyers in the wo…
Consumer Electronics
Thin margins, vendor money and the shift from box to service
Electronics retail runs on some of the thinnest product margins in the industry and survives on everything attached to the box: vendor funding, extended warranties, trade-in, credit, installation and increasingly service subscript…
Home & Living
Big boxes, long lead times and a category tied to the property cycle
Furniture and home goods is the most cyclical category in retail, because demand is created by moving house. In Asia that ties the category to property completions, urban household formation and mortgage conditions far more than t…
Convenience & Foodservice
The format that turned a shop into a kitchen
Asian convenience retail is the most operationally advanced format in the world, and it is only nominally a shop. In Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Thailand the profit sits in prepared food produced on a daily cycle in dedicated commiss…
Luxury
Repatriated spend, clienteling and the price-harmonisation problem
Luxury in Asia is a distribution and pricing question more than a demand question. The region's buyers have historically bought a large share of their goods abroad, and where that spend lands — Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Hainan, Hon…
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