Southeast Asia’s venture capital market is no longer in freefall. But calling it a recovery would miss the more important story.

The region’s startup funding landscape in 2025 has split into two very different markets, according to the “Southeast Asia Startup Funding Report for 2025” by DealStreetAsia and Kickstart Ventures. At the top end, mature companies with revenue, governance and clearer paths to liquidity are once again attracting large cheques. At the bottom, seed and pre-seed founders are still battling lower valuations, slower decisions and investors who want proof far earlier than they did during the boom years.

Also Read: The end of Southeast Asia’s unified startup funding story?

“What we’re seeing at this point is stabilisation rather than a rebound,” said Minette Navarrete, President and Managing Partner of Kickstart Ventures. That distinction matters. Capital is moving again, but with far less tolerance for speculative growth.

The result is a more disciplined Southeast Asian venture market, one that is rewarding companies seen as de-risked, while forcing younger startups to survive longer on leaner terms.

Late-stage capital finds its way back

The clearest sign of reopening came in late-stage funding. Deal volume more than doubled to 24 late-stage transactions in the second half of 2025, compared with 10 in the first half and nine in the second half of 2024. Late-stage equity proceeds rose to US$2.23 billion in the second half, up from US$760 million in the first half.

On paper, that looks like a strong comeback. In practice, the rebound was heavily shaped by a small number of very large deals. The most obvious example was Princeton Digital Group’s US$1.3 billion growth equity transaction in Singapore, which accounted for a large share of late-stage capital raised.

Strip out such mega-rounds, and the picture becomes more measured. Capital was spread across more transactions, but cheque sizes remained cautious. Investors were not returning to the 2021-era habit of backing ambitious narratives at almost any price. They were concentrating capital in companies with scale, market position and a credible route to public markets or strategic exits.

Even so, the reopening was significant enough to create four new unicorns in Southeast Asia in 2025, compared with one in 2024 and two in 2023.

Singapore-based healthtech platform Ultragreen.ai reached unicorn status after a US$188 million pre-IPO growth equity round that valued it at US$1.3 billion. Its subsequent listing suggested that public market investors remain willing to back healthtech companies if they can show clinical validation and revenue depth.

Malaysia’s Ashita Group joined the club after raising US$155 million in growth capital, signalling that scaled e-commerce and B2B2C models can still attract premium pricing when they demonstrate defensibility. Singapore payments company Thunes raised a US$150 million Series D, taking its post-money valuation to US$1.42 billion, while digital asset banking group Sygnum also crossed the threshold after an oversubscribed US$58 million strategic growth round.

These companies sit in very different sectors, but they share a common theme: they are not being funded purely on market potential. Investors are looking for proof that the business model can withstand scrutiny.

The lead investor problem

For late-stage founders, the market has improved, but it has not become easy. The biggest challenge is often finding the first investor willing to set the terms.

Also Read: Southeast Asia startup funding finds a floor, but not a rebound

Mathias Imbach, co-founder and Group CEO of Sygnum, said the central difficulty in closing its growth round was “finding the lead”. Once a credible lead investor is in place, the rest of the syndicate can follow. Without one, even strong companies can remain stuck in prolonged negotiations.

That reflects a broader shift in Southeast Asia. Growth investors are spending more time on due diligence, valuation benchmarks and downside protection. They are still willing to write large cheques, but only when they believe the company can justify the price through revenues, margins, governance and eventual exit potential.

For founders, this means late-stage fundraising has become less about creating competitive heat and more about building conviction among a smaller pool of selective investors.

Early-stage founders face a harder market

The other half of the story is far less comfortable. Early-stage activity, from pre-seed to Series B, continued to slow. Deal volume fell to 209 transactions in the second half of 2025, from 218 in the first half and 259 in the second half of 2024.

Proceeds did rise to US$1.28 billion in the second half from US$1.10 billion in the first half, but this was not a broad-based easing. The increase came from a narrower group of stronger companies rather than a general revival in risk appetite.

The valuation pressure is most visible at the entry points. Median seed valuations fell to US$2 million in 2025 from US$2.5 million in 2024. Pre-seed valuations rebounded to a median of US$500,000 from US$100,000, but the report described this category as volatile.

For first-time founders, the message is clear: investors are no longer paying up for ambition alone. They want early signs of product-market fit, customer willingness to pay and a credible path towards profitability. In Southeast Asia, where markets are fragmented by language, regulation, infrastructure and consumer behaviour, that bar can be especially difficult to clear.

There are still pockets of resilience. Series A valuations held steady at a median of US$10 million, remaining above pre-pandemic levels. That suggests companies which have found initial traction can still raise on stable terms. Series B was stronger still, with median valuations rising to US$17.8 million from US$10.0 million in 2024.

This underlines the bifurcation: investors are not abandoning early-stage startups altogether. They are drawing a sharper line between experiments and businesses that have already reduced execution risk.

Logan Tan, co-founder and CEO of e-procurement marketplace Eezee, said Southeast Asian founders can no longer copy Silicon Valley’s “grow fast at all costs” playbook. “The collapse of several highly funded unicorns here is proof that raising large sums to chase hypergrowth without solid fundamentals is unsustainable,” he said.

His prescription is pragmatic: customer-led growth, margin discipline and a cash runway of one to two years. That may sound conservative, but in today’s market it is increasingly what survival looks like.

The exit problem remains

The biggest unresolved issue is liquidity. Southeast Asia has produced large technology companies, but it still lacks a deep and reliable exit market. Public listings remain selective, while strategic acquisitions are often slowed by valuation gaps between founders, investors and potential buyers.

Edgar Hardless, CEO of Singtel Innov8, pointed to the pressure created by high entry valuations from the last cycle. “The appetite of companies in this region to meet the valuation expectations from entrepreneurs and investors is more limited compared to other regions like North America,” he said.

That leaves venture funds looking for other routes to return capital. Secondary transactions, where existing shareholders sell stakes to new investors, are becoming more important. They do not solve the exit bottleneck entirely, but they can provide partial liquidity in a market where IPOs and large M&A deals remain uneven.

Also Read: Growing SEA startups with Kickstart Ventures

The broader lesson from 2025 is that Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem is maturing, but not uniformly. Late-stage companies with scale are regaining access to capital. Early-stage founders are being forced to build with less. Investors are still active, but they are more selective, more patient and more demanding.

For the region, that may not be a bad thing. The funding boom created speed, but also excess. The current cycle is quieter, tougher and less forgiving. It may also produce companies built to last.

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On 31 August, the European Commission did something no regulator had done before: it looked at a generative AI chatbot and decided it was, legally speaking, a search engine. ChatGPT was designated a “Very Large Online Search Engine” under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), placing OpenAI’s flagship product in the same supervisory tier as Google Search, alongside Reddit and Roblox, both newly tagged as Very Large Online Platforms.

The trigger was scale: ChatGPT’s search-enabled function reported roughly 159 million average monthly users across the EU in the six months to March, more than three times the 45-million threshold that pulls a service into the DSA’s strictest bracket.

Also Read: OpenAI calls for ‘AI infrastructure revolution’ to reboot Japan’s growth

OpenAI now has until the end of November to run systemic risk assessments covering everything from minor safety to electoral integrity, submit to independent audits, and open its systems to vetted researchers. Until last week, these obligations only applied to platforms like Instagram or Google Search, not to a chatbot that writes original text rather than indexing web pages.

Most of the commentary on this has understandably focused on what it means for OpenAI, and for Ireland’s Coimisiún na Meán, which now supervises an outsized share of Big Tech‘s EU compliance. But the more interesting question for readers is what happens next: because the EU rarely regulates in isolation, and Southeast Asia has a well-worn habit of importing Brussels’ homework a cycle or two later.

The Brussels effect isn’t hypothetical here; it already happened once

Southeast Asia has run this playbook before, almost to the letter. When the EU’s GDPR came into force in 2018, it didn’t just reshape how European companies handled data but it became the reference architecture for an entire generation of Asian privacy law.

Indonesia’s Personal Data Protection Law and Vietnam’s earlier data-protection decrees both borrowed GDPR’s core scaffolding: consent requirements, data-subject rights, extraterritorial reach, the works. Regional regulators didn’t hide the influence; they built on it, because writing a data law from scratch is slower and riskier than adapting one that’s already survived its first constitutional challenges.

AI regulation is following the same script, faster. Vietnam passed the region’s first standalone AI law in December 2025, effective this March, built explicitly around the EU AI Act’s four-tier risk classification — unacceptable, high, medium, low — with Vietnamese characteristics layered on top, including a requirement that foreign providers of high-risk AI systems appoint a local contact point.

Indonesia’s draft Presidential Regulation on AI, delayed from late 2025 into early 2026, follows the same EU-style risk-based logic. Thailand’s ETDA is still consolidating its draft AI principles after public consultation, with no firm timeline, but the direction of travel is identical.

A recent ISEAS analysis put it plainly: the EU’s risk-based approach has become the most widely adapted template for AI governance across the bloc, more influential than either the OECD’s principles or the innovation-first models coming out of South Korea and Japan.

Also Read: ‘AI is a race for innovation; regulation will only develop effectively once winners are announced’

So when the European Commission draws a bright line (45 million monthly users, and you’re now a “very large” service subject to search-engine-grade scrutiny), Southeast Asian lawmakers aren’t watching from a distance. They’re watching for the template.

The threshold is coming for the region, not just for OpenAI

Here’s the part that should worry SEA-based AI builders more than the Brussels decision itself: the user numbers that triggered this are no longer a Silicon Valley or European phenomenon. Indonesia is now ChatGPT’s fastest-growing Southeast Asian market, with adoption reportedly climbing by roughly 85 per cent over the past year. Thailand’s AI usage grew by more than a third over the same stretch.

None of the region’s markets have crossed a 45-million-user threshold yet, but ASEAN’s combined online population is large enough, and growing fast enough, that a Jakarta- or Hanoi-specific version of the DSA’s “very large” tier is not a fantasy. It’s a drafting decision waiting for a policy window.

And when that window opens, the compliance bill will not land evenly. A frontier lab like OpenAI or Anthropic can absorb a systemic risk assessment, an independent audit and a data-sharing regime as a cost of doing business in a market it already dominates. A Southeast Asian AI startup that are building on top of a foundation model, serving a regional language, running on a fraction of the balance sheet cannot. Vietnam’s own AI Law already requires foreign high-risk AI providers to register a local point of contact; layer three or four separate national risk-assessment regimes on top of that, each modelled on Brussels but tuned to local political sensitivities, and the compliance burden starts to look less like consumer protection and more like a moat that only the biggest players can clear.

Fragmentation, not regulation, is the real risk

This is the trap SEA regulators need to see coming. Copying the EU’s risk-based logic is not, on its own, a bad instinct; the alternative, no rules at all until something goes wrong, is worse, and the region’s own AI ethics and human-rights advocates have long argued that guardrails are overdue.

The danger is in how the copying happens: five or six ASEAN member states independently translating the same Brussels template into slightly different national decrees, different thresholds, different definitions of “high-risk,” each with its own local-contact-point requirement and its own audit cadence.

Vietnam’s Ministry of Science and Technology has already had to walk back parts of its draft implementing decree after industry groups warned that a rushed, EU-AI-Act-style rollout creates exactly the kind of compliance bottlenecks Brussels and Seoul are still untangling for their own laws.

Also Read: Without governance, AI agents risk becoming enterprise chaos engines

A genuinely EU-inspired approach would borrow the other half of Brussels’s playbook: a single supervisory framework, applied consistently across a bloc, rather than a patchwork of national reinterpretations. ASEAN has the institutional muscle to attempt that, a regional AI governance framework that sets one risk taxonomy and one set of thresholds, rather than leaving Jakarta, Hanoi, Bangkok and Manila to each draft their own. Without it, the region risks importing the DSA’s compliance weight without importing the one thing that makes it manageable at scale: a single market’s worth of harmonised rules.

OpenAI has four months to prove it can meet Brussels’ new bar. Southeast Asia’s regulators have rather longer than that to decide whether they’re building one rulebook, or six.

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For many small merchants in Southeast Asia, payments and loyalty are still treated as separate problems. One system records the sale, another handles digital payments, and a third, if it exists at all, tries to bring the customer back.

StoreHub and ShardLab now want to see whether those layers can be stitched together more tightly.

Also Read: 3 easy tips for SMEs to build overseas customer loyalty

Kuala Lumpur-based StoreHub has received an undisclosed strategic investment from ShardLab, a Singapore-based venture studio that describes itself as the innovation arm of South Korean-headquartered blockchain investment firm Hashed.

The two companies will also form a joint venture to explore new consumer payment and rewards products for merchants and consumers across the region.

No financial details were disclosed. The more important number, at least for the partnership, may be StoreHub’s newly revealed footprint: more than 20,000 merchant locations across Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Japan, processing over 200 million transactions a year with around US$3.5 billion in annual transaction value.

That gives ShardLab something many frontier-technology companies struggle to access: real-world distribution.

From experiments to shop counters

ShardLab was set up through a strategic partnership between Hashed and SCBX, one of Thailand’s largest financial groups, to build and commercialise products at the intersection of financial services and emerging technologies. Its work includes programmable loyalty and rewards infrastructure, a phrase that broadly refers to rewards systems that can be automated, personalised, transferred or embedded into payment flows more flexibly than traditional points cards.

In Southeast Asia, that matters because consumer behaviour is fragmented. Customers may pay with cash, cards, bank transfers, QR codes or e-wallets, often depending on the country, merchant type and transaction size. Loyalty is equally scattered, ranging from paper stamp cards to app-based points and marketplace-led promotions.

For a restaurant chain or large retailer, building around this complexity is possible. For a neighbourhood café, salon or small F&B outlet, it is usually a distraction from day-to-day survival. StoreHub’s pitch has long been that it helps these merchants run sales, payments and operations from a single system.

ShardLab’s investment suggests the next layer could be rewards and payments that are more closely tied to actual purchasing behaviour.

Wai Hong Fong, CEO of StoreHub, framed the partnership around merchant outcomes rather than technology for its own sake.

“StoreHub has spent over a decade building the commerce and payments infrastructure that merchants across Asia use to run their businesses every day. ShardLab and Hashed have spent years at the forefront of payments and rewards technology, and this partnership is about bringing that work to real merchants at scale,” he said.

“Anything we build together must pass the same test that everything at StoreHub passes: does it help merchants sell more? The larger shift within StoreHub continues alongside this: we are rebuilding our product around AI, so that a three-person restaurant can operate with the capability of a thirty-person one.”

That last line points to a wider shift within commerce software. Merchants are no longer looking only for digital cash registers or payment acceptance. Increasingly, the question is whether software can help them forecast demand, manage staff, design promotions, reduce manual work and make better decisions without hiring more people.

Why StoreHub’s network matters

The joint venture gives StoreHub and ShardLab a controlled way to test new payment and rewards models with live merchants and consumers. The companies said specific products will be announced when they launch, rather than outlined upfront.

Also Read: Digital payments: Adapting to a changing world

That is sensible. Southeast Asia has seen plenty of loyalty experiments that were easy to announce and hard to sustain. Consumers may sign up for points, but many forget to redeem them. Merchants may offer discounts, but not always profitably. Web3-linked rewards, in particular, have often struggled when the consumer experience feels more complicated than the benefit.

The more interesting opportunity is less about asking users to understand blockchain, and more about whether the underlying technology can make rewards cheaper, more interoperable or more useful.

For example, programmable rewards could theoretically allow merchants to issue incentives based on customer behaviour, time of day, basket size or repeat visits. They could also support partnerships between nearby merchants, or enable more transparent campaign tracking.

But none of that matters unless it works at the counter, during a lunch rush, with staff who may not be technically trained and customers who simply want to pay quickly.

Hojin Kim, CEO of ShardLab, said StoreHub’s merchant base changes the nature of what his company can build.

“We have spent the past few years testing how new payment and rewards technologies can improve everyday consumer experiences. StoreHub gives us something fundamentally different: a distribution network of more than 20,000 real-world merchant locations,” he said. “This partnership is about moving from pilots to scale and building products that create measurable value for both consumers and merchants.”

A crowded commerce stack

StoreHub operates in a competitive category that cuts across point-of-sale systems, payments, loyalty, inventory and restaurant operations. In Southeast Asia, it overlaps with players such as Singapore’s Qashier, which provides smart POS and payment solutions; Oddle, which focuses on restaurant ordering and management; and Indonesia’s iSeller, which serves omnichannel retail and F&B merchants. Globally, companies such as Shopify, Lightspeed and Square-owner Block have shaped expectations around integrated commerce tools for small businesses.

The challenge for StoreHub is that merchants rarely buy software because it is elegant. They buy it because it solves immediate pain: fewer missed orders, faster payments, better cash flow, clearer stock records or more repeat customers. Any new rewards product born from the ShardLab tie-up will be judged against those practical metrics.

The regional context also cuts both ways. Southeast Asia’s young, mobile-first consumers are comfortable with digital payments and app-based rewards. At the same time, the region remains highly localised. What works for a café in Kuala Lumpur may not work for a food stall in Bangkok or a boutique in Manila. Regulations, payment rails and consumer habits vary widely by market.

That makes StoreHub’s multi-country presence useful, but also raises the bar for execution. A rewards system that depends on heavy consumer education or merchant training is unlikely to scale. A system that disappears into existing payment and checkout behaviour has a better chance.

Also Read: Malaysian startup StoreHub raises US$5.1M in Series A round led by Vertex Ventures

For ShardLab and Hashed, the deal is also a test of whether blockchain-adjacent infrastructure can find a more grounded role in everyday commerce. The sector has spent years looking for mainstream use cases beyond trading and speculation. Merchant rewards and payments are a plausible candidate, but only if the technology is invisible to users and clearly valuable to merchants.

StoreHub’s disclosure of its transaction scale suggests it is no longer positioning itself merely as a software provider for small businesses. It is becoming a commerce network with enough volume to test financial and consumer products on top of its operating system.

The investment may be undisclosed, and the first products are still to come. But the strategic direction is clear: StoreHub wants to sit closer to the transaction, the customer relationship and the merchant’s decision-making layer. If the joint venture can turn loyalty from a cost centre into a measurable sales tool, it could offer a glimpse of where Southeast Asian commerce software is heading next.

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For years, bback was known in Singapore for a narrow, if relatable, promise: helping people feel less wrecked after a night of drinking. Now, under new ownership, the company wants to stretch that proposition into something broader: recovery not just from alcohol, but from exercise, travel, fatigue and the general overload of modern urban life.

DSG Consumer Partners and Saket Gore, former Asia Pacific CEO of Himalaya Wellness, have acquired Singapore-born recovery brand bback, formerly known as bounceback, from Evo Commerce. Gore will take over as CEO.

Also Read: Evo Commerce, parent of D2C anti-hangover solution BounceBack, nets US$2M

The deal value was not disclosed.

The acquisition gives bback a new owner-operator structure at a time when consumer wellness brands across Southeast Asia are trying to move beyond single-use products and build daily habits. In bback’s case, the challenge is clear: it has recognition in Singapore’s alcohol-recovery segment, but will now have to prove that consumers see “recovery” as a category bigger than hangovers.

From party relief to everyday recovery

bback’s flagship product is Party Relief, an alcohol-recovery supplement sold across more than 400 points of sale in Singapore, including Guardian, Watsons and major e-commerce platforms. The brand has also expanded into hydration and liver wellness products.

That gives it a base in retail, but the next phase is more ambitious. Gore and DSGCP want to position bback around multiple occasions: post-drinking, strenuous workouts, long-haul travel, dehydration and everyday tiredness.

“Consumers want to do more, not less, without compromising how they feel afterwards. That’s why we believe recovery is a much bigger category than it is today,” said Gore.

It is a neatly timed thesis. Across Southeast Asia, consumers are spending more on supplements, functional drinks and preventive wellness products, even as price sensitivity remains high. The pandemic made health more personal; the return of travel, nightlife and office routines has made fatigue and recovery more visible.

Singapore, with its dense retail networks, high e-commerce adoption and health-conscious urban consumers, is a useful testbed for brands hoping to travel across the region.

Still, “recovery” is not yet as clearly defined as categories such as skincare, vitamins or sports nutrition. That gives bback room to shape the language, but also places a burden on the company to educate consumers without sounding vague.

A brand built in Singapore

bback was created by Evo Commerce, led by CEO and co-founder Roy Ang, which developed the early product portfolio and built distribution across Singapore’s pharmacy chains and online marketplaces.

“bback laid the very groundwork for Evo Commerce’s journey and proved what we could build from scratch,” Ang said. “Seeing it grow into a favourite in Singapore has been incredibly rewarding.”

For DSGCP, the appeal appears to be less about buying a nascent idea and more about backing an already visible consumer brand with room to widen its use cases.

“Evo has done the initial heavy lift of building an effective, trusted product with strong consumer recognition and meaningful distribution in Singapore,” said Sameer Mehta, Managing Director and Head of Southeast Asia at DSG Consumer Partners. “We believe there is a much larger opportunity ahead for the brand in recovery.”

Also Read: Evo Commerce bags U$2.1M to expand retail touchpoints

DSGCP has spent more than a decade investing in consumer brands across India and Southeast Asia, with more than 100 companies in sectors such as health and wellness, food and beverage, beauty and lifestyle. Its Singapore portfolio includes Moom, Blood, and Protocol — all brands operating in categories where product trust, content and community tend to matter as much as shelf space.

That experience will be relevant for bback. Supplements and functional wellness products are not impulse buys alone; consumers need to understand when to use them, why they work and how they fit into daily routines. That puts pressure on branding, product education and repeat purchase rates.

Why Saket Gore matters

The appointment of Gore is central to the deal. He spent more than a decade leading Himalaya Wellness across Asia Pacific, giving him experience in health and wellness distribution across markets that can differ sharply in regulation, consumer behaviour and retail structure.

His background is particularly relevant because Himalaya has long operated in adjacent categories through products such as PartySmart, an alcohol-recovery supplement, and Liv.52, a liver health product. That gives Gore direct familiarity with both the promise and limitations of the category.

In Southeast Asia, where pharmacies, modern trade, convenience retail, traditional retail and marketplaces all play different roles depending on the country, expansion is rarely as simple as exporting a product. What works in Singapore may need new pricing, formats, education and channel strategy in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam or the Philippines.

For now, bback says Singapore will remain the focus. The company plans to invest further in brand building, product innovation, e-commerce and retail, while hiring locally across brand, marketing, e-commerce, content and operations.

“We want to build bback from Singapore, with the ambition to create a brand that can travel across Asia,” Gore said. “We have the foundations of an established business, but the freedom and entrepreneurial energy to shape what comes next.”

The competitive field

bback will not be building in an empty lane. In alcohol recovery, Himalaya’s PartySmart is an obvious reference point, particularly given Gore’s previous role. In hydration and everyday recovery, the company will compete for attention with functional beverage and electrolyte brands such as Liquid I.V., Pocari Sweat and a growing field of sports nutrition and supplement players available through pharmacies, gyms and online marketplaces. It will also face a broader behavioural challenge: convincing consumers that recovery is a proactive wellness habit, not just a fix after indulgence.

That distinction matters. If bback remains associated mainly with nights out, its growth ceiling may be limited by occasion. If it can credibly expand into hydration, travel and active lifestyle needs, it could sit closer to the broader functional wellness market, where repeat consumption and multiple use cases can support larger brands.

The risk is dilution. A sharp proposition can become blurry when a brand tries to cover too many occasions too quickly. The next phase will depend on whether bback can broaden its meaning while keeping the simple consumer promise that made it recognisable in the first place.

Also Read: Evo Commerce banks US$2.8M more for product development, Asia expansion

For Singapore’s startup and consumer ecosystem, the deal is also a reminder that not every venture-backed outcome needs to be a software exit. Consumer brands built in small markets can travel if they solve a specific problem, earn trust and find the right regional playbook.

bback now has new capital, an experienced operator and a backer familiar with consumer-brand building. What it does not yet have is proof that “recovery” can become a category with regional scale. That is the bet DSGCP and Gore are making, from Singapore outward.

The post DSGCP, Saket Gore buy bback to build a broader Asian recovery brand appeared first on e27.

A few years ago, in a Shanghai conference room, a Korean executive stood up and made a phone call. His joint-venture partner of more than a decade had gone quiet as their factory dispute escalated. Years of holiday gifts. A seat at the man’s daughter’s wedding. Countless dinners across two economic cycles. Surely that bought a returned call.

It rang. Nothing. It rang again that afternoon, and the next day. What collapsed in his face wasn’t the deal. It was his certainty that fifteen years had built something.

It hadn’t — not in the way he thought. He had built proximity. He had never tested whether it created obligation. We measure relationships by time. Markets measure them by what they make people do.

Did what he believed was a relationship ever obligate the other side to act on his behalf — not attend a dinner, not answer a text, but spend their own capital, risk their own standing, because of him?

Guanxi (關係) is not friendship alone. At its commercial core, it is reciprocity with memory — a running account of favours extended and owed, kept current through repeated, deliberate exchange. Feelings are the wrapping. The ledger is the thing.

China asks what you owe each other

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