Henny Sender is the founder and managing partner of Apsara Advisory, a strategic consultancy for financial services companies. She was previously a managing director at investment company BlackRock.
In the bubble years of the late 1980s, the appreciation of the Japanese yen sent a flood of investment from corporate Japan to the fast-growing economies of Southeast Asia. Matsushita, as Panasonic preferred to be called back then, alone accounted for 2% to 3% of Malaysia's gross domestic product as it exported consumer electronics to the world from factories there. Japanese auto companies built cars in Thailand. And the big trading houses such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi imported oil and gas from Suharto's Indonesia back home to resource-starved Japan.
