30 CEOs and business leaders’ top concerns
Business leaders are confronting a new operating reality: one where war, inflation, AI and supply chain shocks are no longer exceptional events, but part of the baseline.
CNBC spoke to more than 30 CEOs, business executives and industry leaders at the annual Converge Live event in Singapore last week.
Across sectors — banking, energy, shipping, technology and manufacturing — a clear theme emerged: uncertainty is no longer episodic. It is structural.
For DBS CEO Tan Su Shan, who runs Southeast Asia’s largest bank, the lesson is simple.
“If you are a manager, manage for maximum flexibility. Because guess what, you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow,” she said. “Stress test, stress test, stress test, so be ready for the worst case scenario.”
1. A world of constant shocks
Executives said the cadence of crises has accelerated, from the pandemic to trade wars, and now geopolitical conflict.
“Long-term planning is becoming more and more difficult,” said Stanley Szeto, chairman of apparel manufacturer Lever Style.
Companies are increasingly abandoning traditional planning cycles. “We kind of threw our three-year and five-year plan out the window,” another executive said.
Instead, leaders are operating in a state of permanent contingency planning.
“It’s no longer ‘just in time’, it’s ‘just in case’,” said Thomas Knudsen, managing director for Asia of jewelry giant Pandora.
That shift is visible across industries: supply chains are being duplicated, inventory strategies rewritten, and logistics rerouted, often at higher cost.
2. Supply chains are under strain and getting costlier
Nowhere is the disruption more visible than in global trade.
More than “2,000 vessels in the Persian Gulf [are] stuck,” said Captain Rajalingam Subramaniam, CEO of shipping services firm Fleet Management Limited, with “nearly between 20,000 to 30,000 mariners” affected.
“It is going to be higher for longer in terms of supply chain cost,” he warned.
For manufacturers, that is already feeding through into inflationary pressure.
“We produce garments … and to the extent that shipping is disrupted, then the cost goes up,” Lever Style’s Szeto said. “Material prices have been going up … so … it’s very inflationary.”
Companies are adapting, but often at a price. Lever Style, for instance, has sharply increased the use of air freight despite higher costs compared to sea transport, prioritizing speed and flexibility.
“The agility of adaptation is key,” Knudsen said.
Some executives were blunt about where those costs will end up: “Ultimately, it will all be passed to the consumer,” Knudsen added.
3. Inflation is testing the consumer
Executives serving mass-market consumers said demand has not cracked, but behavior is changing.
Hans Patuwo, CEO of Indonesia-based superapp GoTo, said the country’s affluent shoppers remain resilient, while lower-income consumers are helped by government support. The middle segment, however, is shifting.
“Now they are willing to sacrifice assortment. They are…
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