The Wrap | 29 Nov – 5 Dec 2025
Asia Tech Lens’ weekly digest of the signals, shifts, and stories shaping Asia’s tech future
Editor’s Note:
What a week it has been for India—and for digital governance across Asia. New Delhi’s abrupt reversal on its mandatory security app showed how quickly public trust and platform pushback can redraw policy lines. Across the region, similar questions of accountability and control surfaced: South Korea faced a national reckoning after Coupang’s data leak exposed structural gaps in platform governance.
China delivered its own contrasts—Baidu cutting deep into legacy businesses while ring-fencing AI and cloud, and DeepSeek open-sourcing a gold-level math model that challenges the dominance of closed frontier labs.
Taiwan advanced plans for a regulated stablecoin, and Samsung’s TriFold launch signaled a new phase in the foldable race as Chinese brands close in.
Podcast Spotlight | Eric Barbier, Triple-A.io
In this episode of Asia Tech Lens: Founder Stories, Miro sits down with serial entrepreneur Eric Barbier—a builder whose career in mobile messaging, prepaid top-ups, and remittances exposed him to the same structural frictions across markets. Whether it was Southeast Asia or Africa, the problems repeated: capital trapped in pre-funding, settlements that stalled on weekends, high failure rates, fraud exposure, and the constant drag of chargebacks.
Those accumulated pain points led to Triple-A.io, a regulated payments institution built on the conviction that stablecoins can help fix the delays and risks embedded in traditional settlements. Eric breaks down what stablecoins actually solve—real-time settlement, finality, and the ability to bypass the bottlenecks he spent years engineering around.
Watch on YouTube | Listen on Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Data Privacy | India
India Drops Mandatory Security App Order After Privacy Uproar
In a major policy climbdown, India has withdrawn its directive mandating the pre-installation of the ‘Sanchar Saathi’ - a state-owned security app, after a rare alignment of public backlash and industry resistance.
Tech giants like Apple signaled they would not comply, citing privacy architecture and policy conflicts. Opposition MPs accused the government of creating a potential “kill switch.” While the government initially pitched the app as a shield against cyber fraud, critics raised alarms over surveillance and lack of consent. The app will now remain optional for users.
Bottom Line: Measures that look like surveillance won’t survive first contact with users or industry, and India’s regulators are learning that legitimacy matters as much as enforcement.
E-Commerce & Data Security | South Korea
Korea Scrambles After Coupang Data Leak Exposes 33.7 Million Accounts
South Korea is grappling with one of its most serious data‑governance failures in years after Coupang confirmed that personal information from about 33.7 million user accounts was exposed. What began as a cybersecurity incident has escalated into a national reckoning involving the Personal Information Protection Commission, the National Assembly, and the Presidential Office. Public anger deepened when filings revealed that senior executives sold shares around the period of the breach disclosure, intensifying scrutiny of corporate ethics and disclosure standards in Korea’s tech sector. Regulators have ordered Coupang to send clearer notifications, bolster safeguards and submit to a full investigation into its system vulnerabilities.
Bottom Line: The Coupang leak signals a broader regional shift: Asian regulators are no longer treating data breaches as IT missteps but as failures that demand public consequences.
MedTech | Singapore
UltraGreen.ai Surges in Singapore’s Biggest Non-REIT IPO Since 2017
Shares of UltraGreen.ai, a Southeast Asia–based MedTech company specializing in fluorescence imaging systems used during surgery, jumped as much as 12% in their market debut after raising US$400 million. The company’s technology helps surgeons visualize tissue and blood flow in real time—a niche but fast-growing segment of global surgical robotics and advanced diagnostics. UltraGreen priced shares at S$1.45 and ended its first day up 4.8%, with analysts forecasting strong earnings driven by premium pricing and expansion into new hospitals and markets.
Bottom Line: UltraGreen’s debut stands out in a REIT-heavy market and points to a broader revival. Singapore’s IPO proceeds are now on pace for their strongest year since 2019.
AI | China
Baidu Cuts Jobs After Q3 Loss; But Shields AI, Cloud Teams
Baidu has begun deep layoffs across its mobile ecosystem and advertising-adjacent units after reporting one of its sharpest quarterly revenue drops in years. The move by the company, which runs China’s largest search engine, comes shortly after it posted a third-quarter loss on November 18, and sources say the cuts will continue through year-end. The reductions are concentrated in units most exposed to China’s slowing ad economy, with internal estimates indicating some teams may lose 30–40% of headcount. Baidu has already been shrinking over the past two years—from more than 41,000 employees in 2022 to about 35,900 in 2024, and this round accelerates that trend. While older internet assets are being pared back, Baidu is explicitly shielding its foundation-model program and AI Cloud, which now form the core of its commercial strategy.
Bottom Line: In China’s intensifying AI race, this is not cost control—it is a strategic reset that makes Baidu’s future priorities unmistakable.
AI | China
DeepSeek Publishes First Gold-Level Math AI
China’s DeepSeek has launched Math-V2, the first open-source AI model to reach gold-medal performance at the International Mathematical Olympiad, a milestone previously hit only by proprietary systems from Google DeepMind and OpenAI. The model is freely available on Hugging Face and GitHub under a permissive license, positioning DeepSeek as an unexpected democratizer in a domain dominated by closed-access frontier labs. Math-V2 incorporates a self-verification mechanism that allows it to check its own reasoning, including on problems without known solutions, addressing a key weakness in current benchmark-trained models.
Bottom Line: By open-sourcing the model, DeepSeek aims to lower barriers for researchers and developers to experiment with advanced AI capable of reasoning, a domain traditionally dominated by proprietary systems.
Stablecoins | Taiwan
Taiwan Targets 2026 Launch for First Regulated Stablecoin
Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) says the country’s first Taiwan-issued stablecoin could enter the market in the second half of 2026, pending passage of the new Virtual Assets Service Act. The draft legislation—modelled partly on the EU’s MiCA framework—is expected to reach the legislature this session and pass in the next. After approval, subordinate regulations and a six-month buffer period will be required before issuance begins. While the bill does not explicitly restrict stablecoin issuers, regulators have agreed that only licensed financial institutions will be allowed to issue them at launch, citing risk-management concerns.
Bottom Line: Taiwan’s timeline mirrors a wider regional turn toward stricter oversight, where stablecoins are no longer experimental tools but regulated financial products.
Consumer Tech | South Korea
Samsung Debuts TriFold as the Foldable Phone Race Heats Up
Samsung has launched its first tri-fold smartphone, a move aimed less at driving immediate sales and more at signaling leadership as the foldable market becomes increasingly shaped by Chinese competitors. Huawei has already released its second-generation tri-fold, and brands like Honor are pushing aggressively into global markets with thinner, cheaper foldables. Analysts see Samsung’s TriFold as a pilot device—a way to test real-world durability and software performance before the competitive landscape shifts again in 2026, especially with Apple expected to enter the category.
Bottom Line: The launch shows Samsung preparing for a new phase of competition in foldables, where innovation speed—not market share—will determine who sets the next design standard.
Signals to Watch
1. Governance backlash is rising across Asia.
India’s Sanchar Saathi reversal and Korea’s Coupang crisis show a region where citizens—and regulators—are far less tolerant of opaque data practices.
2. Open-source AI is becoming geopolitically relevant.
DeepSeek’s Math-V2 release pushes frontier-level reasoning into the public domain, challenging Western AI incumbents and forcing a rethink of how “strategic models” diffuse across borders.
3. Southeast Asia’s capital markets may be turning a corner.
UltraGreen.ai’s strong debut suggests selective investor appetite for deep-tech and medtech, even as broader fundraising remains uneven.
4. Hardware competition is entering a new phase.
Samsung is entering a segment currently led by lower-priced competitors. Its likely goal is to get ahead of Apple in the premium tier when it eventually joins the foldable race.
5. Digital money is being pulled into formal regulation.
Taiwan’s stablecoin timeline reinforces a regional trend: crypto plumbing is moving under the supervision of financial regulators, with institution-issued models becoming the default.
The Takeaway
This week underscored how quickly Asia’s tech priorities are shifting: governments are tightening control over data, corporates are trimming legacy units to protect AI bets, and open-source breakthroughs are challenging long-held assumptions about who leads in advanced models. Markets are selective but not closed—as UltraGreen.ai showed—and hardware competition is accelerating again. The center of gravity is moving toward defensible infrastructure, credible governance, and focused execution.
Sources:
India Today: Government U-turn, Sanchar Saathi pre-installation on phones no longer mandatory
KoreaTechDesk: Coupang Data Leak Forces Korea to Redefine Data Governance and Corporate Accountability
Bloomberg: UltraGreen.ai Jumps in Singapore’s Biggest Non-Property IPO Since 2017
Feature Asia: Baidu cuts jobs after a bruising quarter, but shields AI and cloud teams
Interesting Engineering: China’s DeepSeek sets new benchmark with AI model scoring top marks in maths
Focus Taiwan: Taiwan’s 1st stablecoin to launch in H2 2026 at earliest: FSC Chair
CNBC: Samsung launches its first multi-folding phone as competition from Chinese brands intensifies