 Great, well good morning and a very warm welcome to all of you to this press conference before the start of our 26th World Economic Forum on ASEAN. My name is Justin Wood, I look after the Asia Pacific region at the forum. And the purpose of this press conference is to introduce you to the six co-chairs of our summit and to hear from them about some of the big ideas, the priorities for the summit and their hopes and aspirations about how this meeting can make some progress in pushing forward on all of these ideas and these priorities. I'll introduce the six co-chairs to you very briefly. I'll do it moving from my left along the line. We have Tantri Jamal from AXIATA, who is the Managing Director of President and Group CEO. AXIATA, of course, a telecoms company. Then we have Dr. Wolfgang Yaman, who is the CEO and Secretary-General of Care International. It's an NGO focused on alleviating poverty, has activities across all the ASEAN region and especially here in Cambodia. Then we have Jin Li Chun, who is the President of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a very new multilateral development organization. Then we have John Rice from GE, US multinational conglomerate in many, many different sectors. John's based in Hong Kong. And then we have Tan Hui Ling, the co-founder of Grab. Grab based in Singapore. It's a ride-hailing service, an example of a new economy company. And then finally, we have Kontevin Vongvanich from PTT, a Thai company. Kontevin is CEO. It's in the oil and gas sector. So a wide range of different sectors and priorities and interests, but all passionate about Southeast Asia and the development and progress of this region. So I'm going to hand over to each of them in turn. They'll have three or four minutes to share their aspirations, their hopes for the summit, their priorities for the region, and then with whatever time we have left, we'll have an opportunity for you to ask some questions of them. So Tan Shru Jamal, let me start with you. I was hoping I'm the last. Well, for one thing, you know, we are quite natural for us to be here. We operate in 10 countries, in ASEAN and South Asia. And Cambodia is one of our... It's not the biggest, but definitely among the fastest-growing operation within the group. And it's also quite one of the largest telecos and arguably maybe the largest, and also one of the largest companies in the whole of the country. So kind of natural for us to be here. And given our presence, a strong presence in ASEAN, one of the largest companies in ASEAN. I guess what we have been kind of advocating for the last, not recently, for the last one year or so, is the concept of how the digital revolution, or how can ASEAN leapfrog into the big game of digital and internet and broadband, and create, in fact, we've done a study to create an additional 1 trillion increase in GDP by 2026. That's the kind of advocacy that we are going after. And we would like to get the concept of digital leapfrog to be as a national agenda of all the countries in ASEAN. It's not a telecom or telecom ministry agenda, it should be a national agenda. And we think that ASEAN is the right sweet spot to kind of leapfrog many countries in the world, or many regions in the world to be in the forefront of this digital revolution. In some sense, we are here, in many sense, we are quite behind, but we need to leapfrog. And we have every opportunity to do that. And it takes changes in policy of the government, especially with regards to the telecom industry, the spectrum issue, the question of financial regulation with regards to financial regulation, or for fintech, and so on and so forth. So I'm here because I naturally should be here, but also because I'm advocating this 1 trillion GDP delta growth for the region. Thank you very much. Dr. Yaman. Thank you very much. Good morning. We're glad to be invited, and quite thankful to the World Economic Forum that you give those opportunities to civil society leaders, to co-chair regional and annual summits. I think it's a great commitment. We take this as a serious commitment to partnership around your ambition, which you see in every Web's publication, which is committed to improve the state of the world. So the commitment to such partnerships is quite exciting. They're supposed to be constructive, but they also have a bit of a dimension of challenging one another. So civil society does speak about uncomfortable issues like inequality, like shrinking civic space or human rights. And we do this on behalf of many simple people and communities, which are often at the risk of being left behind when there's particularly so great development opportunities. So my organization works in 95 countries around the world in almost all ASEAN countries. And we particularly focus on the situation of women and girls. And the theme of our conference has such a particular relevance to them, so that we're actually quite excited to be part of the discussion. Our programs that work with boys and girls in the region here do include training in digital and technological capabilities. We try to develop this as a means of resilience to a changing world and to address gender inequalities. So frankly, we do have a problem worldwide. Only one quarter of women do work in ICT or in computer and mathematical sciences. And in our host country here in Cambodia, 94% of doctoral students are male and only 20, 21% of researchers are female. So if this is left untouched, all these burgeoning technological advancements run the risk of even increasing gender inequality. But we need to ensure equality now if growth is supposed to be truly inclusive. And the fourth industrial revolution that we're in the middle of has these unprecedented opportunities to address inequalities that have not been addressed by previous revolutions. Research has shown, this is a McKinsey study, that if we advance gender equality now, as much as 12 trillion US dollars could be added to the global economy by 2025. So closing the gender gap is not just a question of equality and fairness, it's also about good economics. So allow me to focus on feminism, which is not a fad. It is where huge potential economic gains become unlocked. And we have to talk about inclusive growth by prioritizing and promoting goals in the digital skill force today to reap greater dividends tomorrow. So we are working with local communities and we're trying to bring them into what's happening in terms of those rapid developments. And I encourage all participants of this conference to take the opportunity to engage with civil society representatives, which are many, and seek the opportunities that come from our connectedness to the communities and the perspectives they bring. We have seen in many parts of the world how fragile societies and business environments can become if we do not address those questions. Thank you very much. Thank you. And let's move on in here from President Jin at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Thank you, Justin. Our Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is a multilateral development institution, which has now about 70 countries, and by the end of this year, will have about 85 member countries from across the whole world. The mission of this bank is to promote a broad-based economic social development through investment and infrastructure. And we believe that infrastructure is very important for the emerging market economies in their efforts to move to the upper-middle-income countries and improving the livelihood of the people. And a poverty reduction would be the logical and natural outcome of the broad-based economic social development. Asian countries are the first group of countries which participated in the setting up of this bank. And we attach great importance to the connectivity in ASEAN and between ASEAN and other neighboring countries. We believe that our efforts to promote investment in infrastructure and other productive sectors will create great opportunities, particularly for the young people in Cambodia and this region. And I think our efforts to work very closely with the private sector can help the government to release resources to focus on social sector, on environmental protection, on some other kind of very important areas. That is the very good, I think, divisional responsibility between the government and the private sector. So we want to do something in this area, and we are having great cooperation with the World Bank, ADB. We are looking forward to be working in this region. I thank you very much. Thank you, President Jin. John Rice, the priorities and perspectives from GE. Well, thank you, and let me also add my thanks to the World Economic Forum for choosing Cambodia. As the host of the meeting, I think that's a reflection of this country's great progress over the last 30 years with more to come, right? There's still challenges and opportunities, and I think we all recognize that. The market size, ASEAN market size speaks for itself. Almost 700 million people, a growing middle class, markets that have grown on average over 5% over the last 15 years. So for a company like ours that's involved in basic infrastructure technologies, there's no place like home. And we think of the ASEAN region as our home. We've been in some of these countries for almost 100 years, so we're not new. But the other thing I point out is the interdependencies in the region. I mean, this is an enormous, important trading block by itself. We have about 9,000 employees in the region, and we manufacture things, we service things, we do lots of different activities with these employees. 75% of what we do on average in a country goes someplace else. So we try to build export competitive activities so that the markets by themselves don't have to support the business. The export opportunities will help support the business. The basic infrastructure needs are clear, some 15% of the population lacks basic access to affordable electricity. And it's very difficult to solve the disparity issues that we talked about a few minutes ago without solving that problem. So we think about infrastructure as a hierarchy almost and at the very bottom of the triangle. If you think about Maslow's hierarchy of social needs, you have basic things like electricity, clean water, healthcare. Without that, this idea of sustainable economic growth that brings everybody along with it is very, very difficult to achieve. Underpinning that, you have two things. You have human capital and financial capital. And President Jinn is well equipped to talk about the financial capital and the formation of the AIIB, I believe, was important and right. And another way to focus on these basic needs. So in the end, a company like ours, we look at the region, we look at Cambodia as one of our homes around the world. And it's critically important for us to be both a US company, a global company and a very local company in every ASEAN country, depending on what the circumstances require. Thank you. Thank you, John. Huilin, one of the region's newest companies in a very emerging sector, your hopes and aspirations. Firstly, I'd like to say thank you. Very humbled to be on this panel with such distinguished leaders from across the region and the world. Grab, we feel responsible for ASEAN. When we first started the company, my co-founder and I, everything that we wanted to do actually completely aligns with the objectives of this summit. Whether it's around bringing ASEAN together, using technology to leapfrog, thinking about ways how the young generation, more than 50% of ASEAN is less than 30 years old, right, how do we bring all of those opportunities together to shape the future of ASEAN? We've done it via our way of launching Grab, mobile, becoming the dominant transport platform in Southeast Asia. But we also know that we can't do this alone. My objectives and our shared objectives at Grab is to be here and listen, learn, see how we can help, and also share some of the things that we believe can be changed to accelerate this growth. Because ultimately, I don't think I've heard anybody say anything that's not aligned with ASEAN is in a beautiful spot right now. It's untapped. There's tremendous opportunities, and it's in our hands to shape. So ultimately, that's what we'd like to do, and we're here to support in what way we can. Thank you, Huilin, and finally, Kun Tevin at PTT. Thank you, Justin. And I also like to thank the BVF for giving me the opportunity to participate in this forum. ASEAN, as many speakers already mentioned, is growing in a big market size. I think probably on the top five of the largest market community in the world, especially in the region, it's top three. Energy is my area, and energy is required as an enable for development of economy. So energy has few challenges. As an enable, we need to look into the ways and means to provide sufficient energy to all the different countries. And of course, among the ASEANs, we have already developed countries. We have developing, and we have the coming emerging countries as well. So to look into the infrastructure, to look into the cooperation among the ASEAN members, which can help each other would be something which is of great benefit to the growth of ASEAN. The other aspect of energy is the energy transition. We end up looking into the future and maybe changing the way how people use energy from fossil fuel to renewables from the internal combustion engine into EVs. And those are the things that if the ASEAN members are working together and working together also with the nations outside of ASEAN, I think it would be for the best benefit for ASEAN. And so I'm here to listen, to learn, and also to maybe campaign a little bit about the connectivity in energy sector. And for the connectivity maybe to large scheme, one is the physical connectivity, which means the connectivity of molecules of electrons that would be interchanging, interconnecting between the ASEAN countries. And the other area is the virtual connectivity, meaning that we can optimize our investment in infrastructure, sharing all some of the infrastructure that each of our countries are building and so we can maximize the utilization of our infrastructure as well as the funding requirements. ASEAN has one organization which has been set up for, I think, over 30 years, which is called ASCOP, the ASEAN Cooperation on Petroleum, comprising of the 10 national companies. And we are currently talking about this project of connectivity on both areas. So in part I would like just to advertise a little bit for ASCOP so that people would know and get ASCOP to get involved in the activity of the BVF in the future. Thank you. Thank you very much. So you've heard from all the co-chairs and their priorities and their hopes. We have a few minutes left. Are there any questions that any of you would like to put to any of our co-chairs? And before you ask a question, if you could state your name and the organization that you represent. Thank you. This is Yasu Otouz-Nike, which is happening this afternoon. President Zien, we keep hearing that lately you see Mr. Nakau of ADB quite frequently. And I'm just wondering if, what is the nature of the relationship with ADB? It's been told that AIIB and ADB was interpreted in a rivalry situation in the past. But how does it evolve now? Thank you very much for the question. President Nakau and I have been friends for more than decades. And as you know, we not just personally have this friendship, but also we share the common objective of promoting economic and social development in this region. We met 10 times and recently I met him in Yokohama's 50th anniversary of the ADB. And as you know, I served the five years as the Vice President of ADB, working for the Mekong Subregion and other areas in Asia. It's certainly not, it's certainly kind of misconception that the creation of this new bank is to create a rival against ADB or the World Bank. Japan set up this bank with the support of so many countries more than 50 years ago at a time when Asian's economic size was still very much limited. And the living standard and the capital income in most of these countries in Asia were very low. Now 50 years later, the size of the Asian economy is much, much bigger. And the demand for infrastructure investment and other productive sectors is huge. So it may not be possible for one or two institutions to meet the needs of these regions. And furthermore, we share the common objective of promoting infrastructure, but ADB has softer window. ADB promotes social sectors, health, education, poverty reduction. We don't have the softer funding. We focus only on infrastructure and other productive sectors. So there's cooperation, but also division of responsibility. So we enjoyed a very good cooperation with ADB, World Bank, and also EBRD and some other institutions. So people wouldn't understand how wonderful it is for us, this group of AMDBs, multilateral development institutions to work together for the common objective, but with division of responsibility. Thank you very much. Other questions? Yes, over here. Thank you. Hi, I'm Kamaro from Estra, one in Malaysia, one for Tansri and one for Houdin, and of course, AIIB. It's all focusing on the digital leapfrog that Tansri mentioned before. The number is nice, it's $1 trillion US dollars, but the gaps of poverty and the broadband digital gap, for example, even in Malaysia, your home country, in Borneo, for example, why can Asia countries work on specific singular projects like the Allianz of Borneo has three, ASEAN states, for example. Question for AIIB is how much is going to be the focus on digital broadband infrastructure for this leapfrog to happen and to add in to grab and willing, since you're the youngest in front here and you're the new economy captain. Still, unemployment among youth is high, and if you look at it, how would digital opportunities not just give those who are good in programming and coding and maths and computer, but also help the current traditional economy to migrate higher to a digital base? So that's my question, thank you. Let me start, when we talk about the economic digital, I call it digital leapfrog, it involves not just infrastructure that will benefit a few, it should have connectivity all the way to rural areas. You're right, even in Malaysia, connectivity has not reached, the basic connectivity has reached 99% of the population, but broadband connectivity is still lagging. Precisely, I think it requires a lot of both the public sector and the private sector to work together to make it happen, and that's the ecosystem that I was talking about, I want to build between the broadband infrastructure, the financial incentives, the funding of the plan, and the funding of the whole thing, and all of the necessities to make it a big ecosystem. One of the offshoots of the broadband revolution or the digital leapfrog is the financial inclusion, and one of the things we want to do is to be able to reach the, maybe in Malaysia less of a case, but still quite important, what we call financial inclusion on connectivity just of getting people for unbanked customers or underserved customers, and to some extent more of a convenience, right? Now that's more applicable to perhaps more in the cases like Indonesia and many other countries, but still it helps when you talk about poverty to get even people in the poverty level to be able to be part of that digital revolution. And in financial inclusion, like I say it's just one of the many things but perhaps one of the biggest things that affect their life on a day-to-day livelihood. Last point, whether ASEAN can work together, obviously we can and we should, and there's a lot of things we can learn from each other, perhaps the whole broadband community across the ASEAN region, the connectivity from one country to another, and of course one of the most favorite topics has been the roaming, data roaming, and I think eventually there shouldn't be anything called roaming, should be the word for the past, but it takes some time for it to be involved, and also the market should be open to all ASEAN countries, and for example the grab on new digital economics should be very open to all countries within ASEAN and so on. So we have a lot of work to do, but it requires a tremendous amount of work and priority, that's why I keep saying it gotta be a national agenda, it's not a telecom agenda, it's a national agenda that will hit every single people in the society. President Jin, you're... You know, it's very much interesting to note that all sectors are related in this world. A digital economy is certainly important in this present world, but we should understand that digital economy as a form of new economy can only work through the traditional economies. It can understand on its own without the corresponding development of other areas. Digital economy, to my understanding, is to improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness into business. So when we build power plants, the power generation and transmission certainly helps, but when we build roads, railways, ports, and all these kind of sectors, digital economy permeates all these sectors. So even if we do not directly invest in digital sector, we are helping with it. And also, I believe private sector is the best partner for digital economy. Thank you. Really? President Jin, I'm so happy you brought it up because as I think about what examples companies like Grab or other companies can help via digitization, you're completely right. Grab did not, we did not invent transportation. What we did was we applied technology, mobile technology, thinking about it differently to make it much more efficient than it was before, to help it leapfrog from street hailing, from the radio, to something that was way more efficient via data and infrastructure. So as I think about your question, let me use Grab as an example. How can we help with unemployment? That was exactly the problem that Anthony and myself, my co-founder and myself, set for ourselves. To date, what we have done is we currently have more than 850,000 drivers on Grab throughout Southeast Asia. And these are all drivers who can decide when, where they want to work, and if they want to at all. We have part-time drivers, full-time drivers. And we have drivers who are from all generations, whether it's young or older. Why I use this as an example is because I believe technology is not for any particular generation. We need to think about it in segmented, tailored ways. And we need to understand that when we are thinking of building the next form of economy, we need to take everyone along with us. And we need to understand what the changes and shifts and dimensions are, and augment for it. Let me give an example of what we're doing as well, just because that's the industry and the company I know best. Grab, now that we have been able to solidify a strong working business model that brings inclusiveness for our drivers, it brings safety, accessibility, and convenience for our passengers. What we're trying to do now is take the same principles and apply it to payments, the financial services industry. There's a ton of opportunity there again. I'm not gonna talk about Grab, but I want us to think about this as a mindset. When we started a company, we were very, very clear that we did not want a single bottom line. We would not have started a company otherwise. I think about it as a Venn diagram of three P's. People, the people we're serving, the Grab is they're reserving, the Partners that we're serving. The other P, which is critical for it to be sustainable, is profit. It needs to be a sustainable business model. And the third P is the planet. Why we're doing this with transportation and payments is because it's the only scalable way for us to continue growing as a human race while being sustainable, without destroying what the EarthS is. So those are some of the things that I think about. It's worked for us at Grab. We would like to encourage other companies to think about it, older and new. I think stereotypes don't help any of us at this point in time. I would urge all of us to think that that potential and opportunity is possible and that we need to do this together because Grab would not be here today were it not for the support that we've gotten, whether from public governments, private funding institutions, global, regional, local, our customers, everyone here, the media as well. So let's think about every single conversation that we have, what we can do to help each other get to the next stage. Thank you very much, Huiling. Unfortunately, we've run out of time. It's very nice to have ended on an impassioned plea for multi-stakeholder cooperation, which, of course, is what the World Economic Forum is all about. We could continue this conversation and it would be fascinating for many more hours, I'm sure, but hopefully you'll get to hear from our coaches in their sessions over the next two days and many others as well. But unfortunately, now some of our panelists have to, some of our coaches have to get to other sessions. So I'm going to draw this to a close. Thank you very much and thank you, coaches, for joining us. Thank you.