 Great, so welcome everyone to our session on transforming supply chains in Asia Pacific. My name is Michael Wong and I'm an anchor at China Global Television Network or CGTN and it is an absolute pleasure to moderate such a timely discussion on this right now because we know what Asia contributing now to more than around two-thirds of global growth. We're going to need to see robust and sustained recovery in this part of the world in order to see a robust global recovery and of course supply chains underpin the dynamism of the region. There's a special focus today on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN but hopefully our conversation can expand beyond ASEAN to a wider region as well and what we want to achieve in our conversation today is really to draw attention to the ideas, the initiatives, the action plans perhaps to enhance the regional supply chain when it comes to connectivity, resilience as well as sustainability. To bring together governments as well as businesses to think about this common aspiration of ours because it is really no longer enough just to focus on optimizing supply chains. It's no longer enough just to focus on the efficiency of supply chains. So we already have the public and private sector coming together on this issue as this session is associated with the regional action group for Asia Pacific of the World Economic Forum or RAG APAC. So many of you are familiar with RAG APAC but for those who don't know this is a vibrant multi-stakeholder community that provides a platform for government leaders, business leaders and academia to come together and share their experiences in terms of tackling the most pressing issues such as COVID-19 right now but also to address long-term challenges especially in ASEAN and RAG APAC also of course right now contributing significantly towards the development of the ASEAN comprehensive recovery framework which would be the roadmap to lead ASEAN out of COVID-19 to really recover in a more resilient and stronger manner. So without further ado let me introduce our panelists for this session. We are delighted to be joined by Minister Mohammed Lucvi, the Minister of Trade of Indonesia and a young global leader of the World Economic Forum. Minister, welcome. Dr. Rebecca Fatima Santamaria who is the Executive Director of the APAC Secretariat. Dr. Rebecca, welcome. We are also joined by Tarek Sultan Al-Assab, CEO and Vice Chairman of the Board at Logistics Giant Agility and Vijay Aswaran who is the Executive Chairman of the Diversified and Multinational QI Group. So we have a fantastic panel that touches all corners of the supply chain. We've got regional cooperation, we've got government, we've got industry as well so welcome to you all. Alright Minister, let me begin with you first so where I am here in China supply chains have essentially recovered back to pre-COVID levels but growth in ASEAN right now projected to decline by around 4% in 2020. So the first sort of contraction that we've seen in the region in over two decades give us the state of play lay out the land for us in terms of supply chains in ASEAN. Where do they stand right now? How do supply chains look in ASEAN's largest economy where you are in Indonesia but also perhaps the opportunities, the pathways forward to really transform supply chains in the region? Well, something is common in ASEAN especially ASEAN archipelago countries that is the supply chain is actually driven by investment and this investment probably enhanced by the trade wars that's happening between China and the U.S. And also during this COVID-19 digital transformation, digital market becoming under very important coefficients in this issue. So if I can see this trade wars create a lot of movement outside of China to find a subtle very good production area outside of China in order to substitute especially during the trade war. At the same times which Indonesia is experiencing right now, I just announced the result of 2020 trade balance of Indonesia toward the world and there in the pen of oil and gas export we found two very good competitive industry that we export. For the very first time Indonesia actually selling instead of raw materials and half finished goods actually Indonesia now becoming the second largest producer of stainless steel. And the second one Indonesia also have automotive and means you know we're selling cars and spare parts toward the world and becoming number six of our non-oil and gas export meaning that Indonesia right now is connected to the supply chain and we are making sure that the supply chain becoming a good demand so Indonesia will just be becoming very good as well. So if you look Indonesia was ranked number 63 just three years ago but today Indonesia is number 40 we cut down the cost of logistics from around nine percent from our product today to around six percent today but you know for the most advanced country this number has to be lowered by half from six percent so this is an opportunity for countries like Indonesia for countries like in ASEAN and also since I'm coming from the government side government sometimes not helping the process of the supply chain at the very beginning of of of the COVID-19 we experienced that you know the first thing should be do is that no because the demand for PPEs or masks for all this gown you know surgical gown it's very important we try to stop export of PPE abroad you know not long after that we figured it out that you know other countries that have the ingredients for medicine also try to stop that from exporting then we realize that we have to work together and because of that I think in the future taking the lesson learned from this from this COVID-19 countries like Indonesia, Patrisse and ASEAN need to work together mitigate together for some issues especially something like pandemic and the COVID-19 I'm sure this is will not be the last one that we're going to experience and because of that Indonesia is committed that you know we we are part of the value chains of the world we also committed to the make sure that supply chain for everyone not only for Indonesia but have to be for region for ASEAN and because of that I believe the transformations the resilience the efficiency of the supply chain in this region will become very good very efficient and hopefully sustainable. Thank you for that minister it's great to hear that Indonesia is also moving on supply chains it's more connected I guess now to global value chains and you mentioned really working together on supply chains so Dr. Rebecca let me get to you on that because you've spoken before in terms of deeper integration in the region can lead to more resilient supply chains talk to us about how government perhaps can play a more enabling role in making sure the supply chains are more connected resilient and sustainable. Thank you very much for the question thank you for inviting us to to this very important seminar webinar rather before I answer your question I have to state that the opportunities and challenges facing ASEAN are similar to what we see in APEC only that APEC is a much more diverse constituency that has a more diverse constituency extending beyond Southeast Asia and around Pacific Ocean. APEC also includes some very important global supply chain and manufacturing hubs you know talk of China, Singapore, Korea for example so from my vantage point the conversation around supply and value chains must necessarily involve regional economic integration so in the past three decades we have experienced how working together to deepen economic integration has made APEC the most dynamic region in the world. Dr. Mari Pungestu I'm sure Minister Lutfi is very familiar with her she's the managing director of the development policy and partnership at the World Bank. In a recent discussion on trade and investment she noted that the APEC region is seeing faster recovery from the effects of the pandemic precisely because of how integrated our value chains are and the pandemic has made it clear that the imperative is for more regional international collaboration and Minister Lutfi alluded to that when he talked of how your restrictions don't work at some point you got to collaborate and that is you know it has taught us that none of us can go it alone and here's what is you know more apparent. We must look at the supply chain the questions around supply chain is more holistic. It's not just about movement of goods but also services people disruptions not just because of infrastructure but because also the pandemic you know people cannot travel the employees cannot go to work so those affect it and the shipping sector also you know we have vessels that are stuck because of quarantine issues so all these things add up and there's a role here clearly for for governments and the businesses to figure out how do we manage this you know what do we do how do we ensure that these disruptions are not permanent you know this and how do we manage those disruptions. So businesses while you are thinking rethinking supply and value chains and you know you're talking not just about costs but you're talking about resilience and logistical risks we in government we have to look at our rules you know and flexibilities how do we facilitate the flow of essential goods of people how do we enhance regional and global collaboration in research manufacturing distribution of goods whether it's vaccines or medical supplies how do we look at regulatory innovation that is the role of government you know the role of government is really about facilitation and you know at the end of the day businesses will well you know look at how they can survive but they need that ecosystem and that ecosystem is where government has a very strong role you know if you're talking of the the free trade agreements that's part of government but governments cannot negotiate that on its own right we need the businesses to provide the input so that's a lot going here you know so much we can say about it but Michael I don't want to dominate this conversation if you get me going I'll never stop so yeah let me stop here I can hear the passion Dr. Rebecca in terms of really bringing together government in the private sector to deal with this issue and speaking of a business Mr. Sultan let me get to you because agility 26 000 employees in some 100 countries so from an industry perspective you are very passionate in terms of digitizing customs and perhaps you can expand on that a little bit more for us in terms of the opportunities that provides in particular to small and medium-sized enterprises what opportunities that means for SMEs and why are you drawing so much attention to SMEs because this could be perhaps an underappreciated element when we talk about supply chains. So thank you for that good question I think this year has been an unmitigated disaster for the SMEs you know before kind of touching on customs I think it's important to understand what's actually been happening in the supply chain around the air freight and ocean freight you know air freight the capacities have been come off line around 20 percent at the same time the shortage of air freight has been basically made worse by the fact that the shipping industry has taken a lot of capacity online offline and we've seen prices for containers going up in many instances you know 500 percent. Clearly the SMEs are bearing the brunt of those impacts for a couple of reasons first of all that disruption by definition means that a lot of the digital systems are coming offline so the systems that were designed to kind of facilitate SMEs doing business around the world were transformed from being online digital businesses to being out of business basically overnight. Second element that kind of undermined SMEs in this kind in this phenomenon was the fact that with capacity constrained obviously larger customers global businesses clearly had priority over existing capacity which made it even worse for SMEs so you know with that backdrop I think it's important that you know we all see this as a temporary phenomenon hopefully that we will start resolving itself as vaccines come online and as the shipping industry kind of brings the capacity back online. Now pivoting to customs it's very interesting that in some of the countries where we have worked in digitizing customs those countries many of the countries actually had these systems weren't using them which I think is very interesting a thing to say in other words they had digital capacity but for one reason or another customs was not acting in a digital way. Now along comes COVID and I've seen two instances of countries that went completely digital with customs where they had the capacity in place beforehand and it took COVID to actually get everything online and customs to be working in the virtual world. We need to kind of preserve that motive I thinking I think going forward the fact that customs could actually digitize and operate digitally during COVID means it's something that we can do all the time so I think customs modernization is key to SMEs. They bear the brunt of the friction across border they bear the brunt of all of the the different trade rules and everything we can do to simplify their lives is going to be adding to the value of the global economy going forward because nine or every ten new jobs are coming from the SME sector and we need to basically we need that sector to help us get out of this recession that we're in. Mr. Seltan if I may let me quickly follow up and maybe clarify so in my view I always felt COVID should be an accelerator in terms of digital transformation but you're saying right now still not that many countries or supply chains in many industries even with COVID perhaps are not digitally transforming as fast as we should see is that what you're essentially saying? Mr. Seltan you're going to have to unmute first. Yeah what I'm saying is that there are some segments of the economy that move very quickly rapidly towards digitalization that really had to take their digital processes offline and I think there are some people that you need to kind of like understand how serious of an event that was especially for an SME. An SME doesn't have a global organization to actually help navigate these issues. They have to do it themselves. When you take them off a digital platform you're actually introducing a lot of costs and uncertainty to their life so that's the reality of the situation because of the lack of capacity in the supply chain. Now on the other side when we talk about public sector processes for sure this crisis has accelerated governments I think views towards using the digital technologies in customs and more importantly it's actually I think now that I think citizens have gotten used to receiving services from the government in a digital way there's no going back. So you know if tomorrow the vaccines are rolled out and everything goes back to what we call normal I don't think any government will be justified in actually going backwards for digital customs. So I mean that's maybe one of the kind of lasting hopefully opportunities that will will be beneficial to everybody. Okay got it thank you for that Mr Sultana. Dr Vijay let me get to you because speaking of vaccines being rolled out whether it's supply chains overall in ASEAN recovering or SMEs recovering being more included in supply chains you talk about the need for ASEAN to see more coordination when it comes to rolling out vaccines. So the vaccination supply chain is very critical in your view. Give us some more color on that. Well first of all I wanted to be here pleasure to be among all of you. The thing that I think I'd like to draw attention to simply is that before COVID ASEAN was well on track to becoming the fourth largest economy in the world and primarily it was one of the fastest to react to a digital initiative resulting in amazing developments in terms of SMEs and businesses online. Some 87% of youths have you know increased their digital footprint and this has resulted in at least 42% of youths adding on one more tool online. This has resulted in of course as Mr Sultana has referred to a spike in terms of requirements in terms of products being delivered across boundaries and across borders and this is also going to be both the strength and weakness of ASEAN. If we are basically you know we reacted ASEAN reacted very fast with the Hanoi initiative. I think it was phenomenal that they actually came together as fast as they did and the Hanoi plan of action had two key points as far as I was concerned. One is basically the regional and global supply chain to combat COVID and this should be done without prejudice to the ASEAN member states. That's the first one. The second is which I think is national contact points. I'm not sure either of these are taken off and this is a challenge because now we come to what I refer to as vaccine diplomacy. Vaccine diplomacy is in effect the fact that currently we have over half a dozen vaccines available globally and perhaps 10 of each will be reaching ASEAN by mid-year. Now if we had one common negotiating we have 600 million people with arguably one of the fastest most digitalized infrastructure. Now if we could actually turn this to our advantage it would be a negotiating tool but on the other hand if we went our own separate ways then this would not only split ASEAN it would create more or less unfortunately a footprint for the rest of the planet. Now I think ASEAN is actually a very important space. It's the backyard of both China as well as India and of great interest to the United States and Europe. So ASEAN would be the space where we need to develop better infrastructure create better lines as His Excellency pointed out the biggest problem seems to be in somewhat or rather regulations as opposed to calling it a government I would refer to it as regulations. So regulations have not moved as fast enough you know to catch up with the speed of what needs to be done today. At the beginning of Covid there was in fact a remarkable growth in terms of e-commerce and this is online and this resulted actually in a phenomenal in within ASEAN a real resurgence in certain aspects of the economy as His Excellency pointed out in terms of cart rate and this and that reselling of goods etc and so on but things are basically getting somewhat hitting a little or maybe bumps on the road because regulations restrictions are creeping up and the boundaries are creeping up and that is a challenge for any SME to develop within the region. And Dr Vijay hopefully we can smooth out some of those bumps that's why we're here right to see if we can focus on public private collaboration in terms of getting vaccines to everyone we want to certainly see more vaccine cooperation going forward. Let me ask each one of our panelists of the same question because again you know when we talk about supply chains and transforming them this is not a matter of you know government or business this is about government with business government and business. So if there's one public private partnership that initiative that you would all like to see in terms of transforming supply chains what do you think that would be the same question to every single one of you minister let me start with you what do you think. Well one of the one of the things that I think is very important between private and government side is we have to do the demand okay. For example digitalizations especially the e-commerce in Indonesia skyrocketed during this COVID-19. It has an it has an effect negative and positive effect for the for the trade of course it's positive the numbers going up people getting supplied much faster easier cheaper but at the same time also killing the value chain that had happened for the last 50 years. This is better for the economy and I totally agree that the government needs to embrace this process government needs to facilitate this process and if we can do these things together is that the private and partnership is one of the most important that we are trying to enhance in the country and hopefully you know just not with one country you know Indonesia would like to do this with our neighbors also you know making sure that trade is going very well as well and I don't know how to emphasize more to have this collaborations not only between the private and the government but also between among governments needs to enhance this as a part of mitigations like I said like Dr. Fidget said about the vaccine. Unfortunately we don't have a process going together and we are not bargaining with 600 million people in ASEAN instead you know every country trying to negotiate by themselves and if you look at the at the profile of our vaccinations it looks very thin in the beginning maybe heavier by second and by second and third quarter but only big in the fourth quarter so and I truly believe that you know without without the vaccinations without this fighting the COVID-19 this will be very difficult so maybe we should start the partnerships between private and government to fight the COVID-19. I'm pretty sure this is not the first one but definitely will not be the last one and we should start from there. Okay all right thanks for that Minister Lucia a very strong message of optimism and collaboration we're just a tad short on time about six minutes left in the first half so Dr. Rebecca let me turn to you now. Thank you so much you know for me I want to be very practical and granular about this so it's not just about COVID but post COVID in the recovery phase what are we going to do so let me just focus on the role of government working together with business the whole idea of trade facilitation and trust I think we need to build trust here also one very practical initiative and I know Tarek talked about customs modernization I want to take it a little step further and deeper one practical initiative that we should be focusing on and this is the time to do it is to get more of our companies on the authorized economic operator program now this is a WCO program the world customs organization it is it is so technical it is very difficult for SEPs to get onto this program so how do we work with customs with government so it's an intra-inter and intra-governmental body that needs to do this together with business especially the SMEs when I was at the trade ministry in many years ago there was one of the things I said can we try and help the SMEs because the SNAEO you get benefits you know faster clearance deferred payments and all that but it is so technical because there is an element of standards you know it's like ISO you must abide this mutual recognition and then trust again so how do we get this how do we get the government bodies working together the what they call the other government agencies working with customs and corporations you know so this this is and we've done in APEC we have done studies on this case studies which we are very willing to share where we've seen companies and economies that have really got their AOS their companies onto this this program they have seen reduced customs clearance times they've done this time time release studies and they've shown reduction in the in the time to export time to import so this this is a very practical way of you know getting us to facilitate it so that business can carry on your supply chains your competitiveness is there you know and it is it has been in existence for the longest time we just need to get our act together and get on it because if our role is to make it easier faster and cheaper to do business here is an opportunity use this work together and you know we cannot work customs has a key role so has other government agencies you know so let's if I were to offer one I would offer this make it simpler make it easier less complex so that SMEs can get onto this and take the benefits as well okay so building trust and simplify the procedure for SMEs and Mr Sultan if you could please so the the two most important phenomena is that we need to facilitate and we're going to need them to basically come out of the recessions that it's global recession cross-border e-commerce and and the kind of development of SMEs those those two sectors basically when you have and when we talk about customs I think modernization we talk not just about customs but all of the digital processes around customs and and kind of making sure we put those in a digital format that allows the business processes to be one and standard across all government agencies I think you know we need to make sure that we engage and be in public private partnerships to help kind of expedite these these projects because they are very difficult projects to undertake especially when you're talking about typical I would say customs modernization project is going to involve 20 or 30 different stakeholders in any different any individual government I know in over a hundred different government agencies involved in that digitization program so it gives you an idea of how complex it is but if you get it right you'll be basically creating value in business for the SMEs and for e-commerce without it e-commerce and SMEs are going to be running into a brick wall got it all right thank you Mr. Sultan Dr. Vejit to you a bit short on time maybe just 30 40 seconds crystallize your thoughts I totally agree with both the its excellency with just what Mr Sultan has said and clearly with Anshi Rebecca we need e-commerce and cross-border uh business to improve and this has to be made simple fast and efficient and this cannot happen primarily from either only the government point of view or or either the private point of view there has to be a partnership and this has to somehow be evolved and brought to the fore ASEAN is the best place for this to happen I strongly again propose that we go back to the Hanoi initiative and take it on to the next level okay great we're going to leave it there thank you all so public private sector collaboration focus on digitization government to government government and business trust simpler processes for SMEs and e-commerce thank you