Six companies that entered APAC markets with capital, brand recognition, and local partners — and still failed. And one that built a model the right way. Each case is documented with sources so you can go deeper.
LinkedIn entered China in 2014 as the last major Western social network allowed to operate there. By 2021 it had shut down its core social features. The story of what happened in between is one of the clearest case studies in how regulatory compromise can gradually hollow out the product you brought to market.
Read case studyGroupon entered China in 2011 with Tencent as a partner, $8.6M in capital, and a plan to dominate the group-buying market. Within a year it had laid off more than 400 staff and closed 13 offices. The collapse came not from the market — but from how Groupon chose to enter it.
Read case studyKellogg's launched in India in 1994 with a $30M investment and heavy media support. By September 1995, sales had virtually come to a standstill. The product was fine. The problem was that Kellogg's had tried to replace one of the world's most diverse breakfast cultures with a bowl of cold cornflakes.
Read case studyWalmart entered South Korea in 1998 and exited in 2006, selling 16 stores for $882M — never making the top five retailers. The world's largest retailer was undone not by a lack of scale, but by a failure to understand what South Korean shoppers actually wanted from a supermarket.
Read case studyVodafone's acquisition of J-Phone in 2001 was the largest foreign investment in Japan at the time. Five years later it sold to SoftBank for ¥1.75 trillion — having lost subscribers for a year. Its own CFO later summarised the failure in three words: bad foreign management.
Read case studyGojek launched in Vietnam in 2018 as GoViet with $500M in regional expansion capital and the momentum of Indonesian dominance. After six years and ₫5,700 billion in accumulated losses, it exited in September 2024. The lesson: what made Gojek dominant in Indonesia did not exist in Vietnam.
Read case studyHonestbee raised $49M and expanded to eight APAC markets in three years. By 2019 it was delaying salaries and owing creditors $180M+. The autopsy is straightforward: it expanded into new markets without ever proving the business model worked in a single market first.
Read case studyiflix raised $348M, expanded to 25 markets, and reached 25 million users. Tencent bought it in 2020 for 'tens of millions.' The problem was not execution — it was that iflix built a subscription streaming model in markets where the structural economics of that model were never going to work.
Read case studyKitKat is not a top-selling confectionery brand in Japan because it made a clever marketing pun. It's top-selling because Nestlé Japan built a distribution model, a cultural insight, and a product innovation engine around how Japanese consumers actually buy, give, and value food.
Read case studyMcDonald's entered India in 1996 — the same year Kellogg's was failing in the same market. Faced with the same cultural complexity, they reached the opposite result. The difference was a willingness to rebuild the product, the supply chain, and the operating model from scratch.
Read case studyJapan was Starbucks' first market outside North America — a country with a refined tea culture, an existing coffee shop scene, and exacting consumer standards. Nearly 30 years later, it operates ~2,000 stores and generates $1.2bn in annual net income. The story is not about brand power — it's about research, restraint, and cultural alignment.
Read case studyBefore Slack had a Japanese product, Japan was already its third-largest market. Most companies would have launched immediately. Slack spent six months doing in-person user research in Japanese offices first — then built a localisation, sales, and positioning strategy around what they found. Japan became their second-largest market globally.
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