Toll executive urges ASEAN supply chains to absorb repeated shocks

Standard Chartered’s Future of Trade report places the share of ASEAN executives citing geo-economic actions among their top three trade concerns at 49% for the past year and 57% for the next three to five years. The survey covered 2,100 senior corporate leaders across 27 markets.

What changes when one disruption becomes many?

At the Fortune Southeast Asia 500 Summit in Ho Chi Minh City on Tuesday, Toll Group executive chairman Thomas Knudsen said companies need supply chains built for robustness, not just emergency resilience, because “a black swan event has become a flock of black swans.”

His chronology of shocks began with COVID-19 in 2020, followed by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Donald Trump’s 2025 tariffs and the end of de minimis, and most recently the U.S. war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Before 2020, Knudsen said, resilience meant reacting after a crisis: call banks and logistics companies and ask them to help get out of the problem. The new task starts deeper in the supplier chain, at tiers two through four, rather than waiting for outside assistance.

How does spare capacity change the freight plan?

Robustness means spare capacity, according to Knudsen: maintain backup routes by truck and rail alongside ocean and air, and use sea-air combinations that fly part of the journey and ship the rest. His operating formula was to complement trucking today with rail, ocean and air tomorrow rather than depend on one mode when one route fails.

For shippers, that changes disruption management from a post-crisis rescue call to preplanned capacity and visibility. Carriers and forwarders gain a larger role in route design, while procurement teams must map beyond first-tier vendors before another port closure, tariff change or supplier failure strands cargo.

Toll Group, founded in 1888 and now owned by Japan Post, operates freight forwarding and contract logistics across Asia. That footprint gives Knudsen’s recommendation a direct carrier-side context: robust networks depend on combinations available when the normal lane is unavailable.

Knudsen also set a cost boundary. For low-value cargo such as cement, duplicate routes and reserved capacity can be uneconomic because the product cannot support the additional freight cost. Robustness therefore does not mean every company buys the same protection, and the tradeoff falls hardest on low-value shipments.

Tariffs have also pushed Chinese companies toward new markets and manufacturing hubs, Knudsen said, and he does not expect that production shift to reverse. That pattern gives Southeast Asian manufacturers more potential supply-chain demand, but it also raises the importance of dependable links among tier-two, tier-three and tier-four suppliers across multiple countries.

Is ASEAN trading more like the EU?

Standard Chartered’s James Nesbitt, managing director and head of global subsidiaries for Singapore and ASEAN, said the bank’s corporate clients are making long-term strategic commitments to the region. His warning: “This isn’t simply about a foreign company setting up a factory in Indonesia, waiting for that factory to produce, and then kind of moving on.”

The ASEAN Free Trade Area, established in 1992, has fostered regional integration by eliminating tariff barriers among Southeast Asian countries. Its 11 economies together generate about $4.5 trillion and grow 4.5% a year, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Yet only about 22% of ASEAN trade occurs within the bloc, compared with roughly 60% for the European Union. Knudsen pointed to the EU’s single currency and open borders as the model for ASEAN, saying the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU showed that regional friction becomes real, not merely a minor obstacle.

Can payment links reduce regional friction?

Nesbitt said each ASEAN market operates its own real-time payment network. He proposed an integrated overlay that would let those separate infrastructures process transactions together in real time, shifting the discussion from bilateral payment links toward a region-wide layer.

He asked whether blockchain, tokenization or stablecoins could make that interconnection possible. The commercial test is practical for companies committing to ASEAN for the long term: they still need efficient settlement across markets where they source goods, sell products and finance trade.

The agenda emerging from the summit is clear: shippers need spare modal options and deeper supplier visibility, carriers and forwarders need to sell integrated alternatives, and ASEAN needs payment links capable of supporting more of its own $4.5 trillion trade base. Capacity planning will matter as tariffs, security risks and production shifts keep supply chains unsettled.