Asia Report

The 2019 Worldcom Confidence Index is an invaluable benchmark for the confidence levels of business leaders.  In our second annual Confidence Index, we commissioned Advanced Symbolics Inc. (ASI), a research company that uses artificial intelligence (AI), to create a fully representative understanding of what audiences are saying. We captured and analysed the online contributions, in nine languages, of 58,374 CEOs and CMOs globally. This enabled us to identify which topics are highest on the leadership agenda, and how confident or concerned leaders are about the topic. 

Since we published our first Confidence Index, world events such as: the US/China trade war, Brexit, Amazon forest fires, the Hong Kong crisis, the increasing pace of global warming and the resurgence of diseases such as Measles, have continued to create a more uncertain world. Our second Confidence Index shows exactly how confident or concerned business leaders are about dealing with these challenges.  

This year’s findings have uncovered a 21% decline in confidence globally since 2018.

In this second annual Asian Confidence Index, we captured and analysed the online contributions of 12,811 business leaders from 17 countries across Asia. There are some interesting similarities and differences with the global results.

The top six findings for Asia are:  

#1 Asian leaders’ buck the confidence trend – rising 5% since 2018 compared the global decline of 21%

#2 Influencers become the top audience for leaders – growing their share of attention by 100%

#3 Employee-related topics dominate leaders’ agenda

• Employee-related topics take five out of top six topics
• Upskilling and reskilling is the most discussed topic and has the second highest confidence score
• However, leaders are concerned about reaching this audience. Employees has the third lowest CI score of all audiences

#4 Asian leaders are very concerned about handling a crisis. This topic has the lowest score of all 23 topics in the Asian Confidence Index

#5 The impact of the media features is the second most discussed topic, but Asian leaders are mildly concerned about the media’s impact – with a confidence ranking of #15 of 23 topics

#6 Asian leaders are confident about satisfying customers – producing the third highest confidence score on the Asian index.

The Global report for the Worldcom Confidence Index 2019 can be seen here. You can view the full Asian report here or see the deck below. To have the best viewing experience please use full screen mode.