Business

The past 12 months have been eventful and challenging to navigate. As transformative developments – including the climate crisis, economic and geopolitical uncertainty, and rapid advances in technology – impact the business landscape, organisations are under pressure to transform the way they do business.

In this dynamic environment, Deloitte Asia Pacific is leveraging the best of Deloitte across our geographies, businesses and industries to help our clients thrive amid disruption. As the stories in this report indicate, we have been able to tackle our clients’ most intricate challenges by staying attuned to the market's demands, developing comprehensive solutions through our multidisciplinary approach and bringing our sector expertise to the front. 

Over the past year, we have also focused on making bold moves to innovate, embrace and shape the future. This included delivering value in key areas that matter to Asia Pacific businesses, from Sustainability and Climate, Generative AI and Managed Services, to Digital Government, Smart Cities and Factories, and Private Equity. 

In FY23, we drew on our regional strengths to bring our best to clients. Looking forward, we are committed to build a unique brand identity with a shared voice, nurture a diverse community of confident leaders, and stand by our clients as they navigate growth. It is not just business; it is about genuine partnership and supporting each other's journey.

Driving climate-led transformation for decarbonised growth across Asia Pacific

Meeting the decarbonised future requires transformative solutions that can minimise climate risk and capture value from an emerging green economy, particularly in Asia Pacific where we have the most to lose from climate inaction but also the most to gain from meaningful and effective action on climate.

Over the past year, Deloitte Asia Pacific’s Sustainability & Climate practice has worked with companies spanning multiple industries and geographies to help them respond to the challenges and create opportunities in the transition towards decarbonisation by offering new ways to conduct business, make choices and prepare their organisation for the future. This includes the development of targets, strategy, capabilities, operating models and data, reporting, and disclosure structures to scale climate-led approach to transformation, with innovation and aligned governance at the core.

Transformation that complies with mandatory regulatory requirements – emerging and implemented global and regional Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting regimes and standards – is critical for our clients. As a result, our teams work with companies to embed sustainability requirements in business strategies, data transformations and operations and ensure that they can better measure and report on their progress in a compliant, measurable way. 

The energy transition will require new ways to collaborate across industry and geography. Deloitte is collaborating across Asia Pacific geographies to support clients to implement the required policy shifts, bring partners together to solve new trade and investment models and assess and grow new workforce skills and models to ensure a safe and just transition for people, business, and economies in the region.

Climate technology is an essential part of the solution for organisations in all sectors – innovation is happening at an exponential pace, however many of these innovative climate technologies are yet to be commercialised at scale. To help bridge that gap, Deloitte launched GreenSpace Tech by Deloitte, an AI-enabled ecosystem solution that connects emerging technology with industry. GreenSpace Tech helps organisations scale and apply that technology to decarbonisation challenges across the value chain.

Deloitte Asia Pacific teams are helping clients position themselves to be sustainability leaders, shaping climate-led, transformative paths to growth and making an impact that matters for both people and the planet.

Navigating digital disruption and transformation with AI

The rapid development of AI – including the emergence of generative AI – has unlocked a host of new marketplace applications promising a surge of productivity growth. Deloitte Asia Pacific’s AI Centre of Excellence AI CoE has worked to help clients harness the power of applied AI to capture new business opportunities and accelerate the pace of innovation.

Part of an extensive regional network, our AI CoE gives our clients access to the latest expertise and capabilities, in particular on Generative AI. Together, we build on regional and global successes, insights and lessons learnt to make the most of local opportunities.

In guiding our clients through this complex, fast-evolving landscape, we’re drawing on our strong ecosystem of alliances with many of the world’s leading technology providers.

The past year has also seen us make bold investments in our own digital capabilities, including integrating generative AI into our platforms. That’s helping us enhance the delivery of our offerings and assist clients in deploying this transformative technology.

In all our work in this area, we're guided by our Ethical Technology Principles, which have been developed to ensure that Deloitte Asia Pacific’s creation and use of technology is responsible and trustworthy.

Cultivating insight-driven, connected digital governments

Across Asia Pacific and beyond, governments are seeking to remove silos in both thought and practice so they can deliver tangible outcomes for citizens. They are moving away from traditional hierarchies and towards ecosystems that enable cross-departmental and private enterprise collaborations.

But as leaders look to adopt this approach in today’s digital world, they are also increasingly realising that technology alone isn’t enough. To be successful, they must consider fundamentally shifting their operations and culture to transform their organisations into digital enterprises. This is digital government transformation.

At Deloitte Asia Pacific, we believe AI and automation have tremendous potential to improve public sector operations and drive mission impact. Over the past year, our teams across the region have drawn on our global network and sector expertise to accelerate digital government, be it in improving operational efficiency or adopting the latest technologies for universal access.

In New Zealand, for example, our teams built and implemented an innovative new communications platform system that is enabling the country’s healthcare service providers to communicate more effectively about national healthcare issues, from public vaccine programmes to countrywide health campaigns.

Scaling the adoption of smart manufacturing technologies with Smart X

Manufacturers  in Asia Pacific’s smartest organisations are building on decades of experience to innovate and use new technologies to make manufacturing more agile, efficient, sustainable and safe.

Marrying advanced manufacturing with Internet of Things (IoT), cloud technology, computer vision and cybersecurity to create interconnected systems, these smart manufacturers are rethinking what’s possible and how to achieve it at scale. But the first step is having a vision of what’s possible – which is where Deloitte Asia Pacific comes in.

By aligning strategy, technology and operating and commercial models, our ‘Smart X’ approach is enabling manufacturers across the region to design, test and understand how to scale capabilities across their value chain.

As a result, these organisations are better positioned to solve their most significant challenges and find the straightest path to value – transforming what’s next into what’s now.

Find out more about Deloitte’s Global Smart Factory network.

Enabling private equity firms to drive value across the investment lifecycle

With the recent shifts in capital markets and a shrinking public company market, private equity has evolved quickly to become a mainstream investment option in Asia Pacific.

Each private equity firm – along with its portfolio companies – has a unique set of needs relative to its business, industry, sector and stage of maturity. It’s why at Deloitte Asia Pacific, we focus on providing tailored private equity solutions that are underpinned by our global network, technical abilities, deep sector expertise and local market knowledge.

We have extensive experience working across the investment and ownership lifecycle, from fund set-up to transaction advice, accounting, financial reporting, operational and exit strategies. 

We uncover, create and drive optimal value for our clients through a collective relationship approach, applying our understanding of each firm’s business model across its entire portfolio. 

To find out more, please contact Dwight Hooper, Asia Pacific Private Equity Leader

Embedding continuous advantage in core business services

Evolving regulatory and risk requirements, talent shortages and the need for increasingly specialised skillsets – along with new disruptive technologies – can create operational challenges. Even as organisations look to grow and innovate, the unrelenting pace of change can make it hard to keep up.

This is why we’ve focused on expanding Deloitte Asia Pacific’s Operate services. These aim to help organisations transform and advance critical business functions to increase efficiencies, add value and embed continuous advantage into their operations.

Drawing on a mix of globally and locally available and scalable industry talent, technology and deep transformation experience, our teams have helped clients tackle complex challenges in critical areas of business, ranging from tax compliance to cybersecurity and combatting financial crime. Our Operate delivery networks include more than 50,000 practitioners, many working from multi-language delivery centres across the world.

We’ve also designed our Operate services to be industry focused, underpinned by our deep experience working across industries in Asia Pacific. Our areas of expertise include financial services and insurance, retail and consumer, manufacturing, government and public services, among others. 

It’s an approach that is allowing clients to move beyond conventional outsourced services to perform and innovate continuously – accelerating growth and managing risk with confidence.