Welcome back to a special series of MLEX podcast designed to make sense of

2023 and what the new year is likely to bring.

My name is James Panicki, Emlix's Asia Pacific Senior Editor, and

it's great to have your company. Today we're off to Southeast Asia, a region with a wide

and diverse range of regulatory features. Yet as we'll hear today, certain trends are emerging,

as relatively new enforcement agencies begin to find their voice with regulatory

risk ramping up as a result.

Emnex's Southeast Asian correspondent Jet de Mazos Santos has been chronicling these developments

over the past year.

She's usually based in Jakarta but was at home in Manila in the final days of 2022 from where

she filed this analysis of the year to come.

It's not easy to find trends across Southeast Asia because of how different each of the

countries are. But if we were to find a word that would encapsulate what we can expect in

2023, it would have to be change. So first in terms of antitrust leadership,

we might see changes in three of the five countries with active regulators, the Philippines, Thailand,

and Indonesia. So the heads of the Philippine and Thai agencies will complete their terms by the first

week of the new year. But they can be reappointed. And this is important because these two relatively young competition commissions are, in a sense, still finding their footing.

We're all still waiting for them to issue their first major antitrust decisions, you know, the ones that will create precedents for future competition commissioners to follow.

We know that the Thai Commission is currently investigating an anti-dumping case and one involving low-cost airline prices.

The Philippines also have several pending cases, some of which date back to 2016.

And we know that the Commission has been struggling to finalize them over the past year.

So if the current shares are reappointed, then we could see these two regulators on a sort of

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