Southeast Asia is one of the fastest-growing B2B markets in the world. Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore collectively represent over 700 million people and a combined GDP approaching $4 trillion. Yet when you search for distributors in these markets using Apollo, ZoomInfo, or any mainstream B2B database, you hit a wall.
Coverage in SEA is thin. Most global databases index companies based on English-language web presence, LinkedIn profiles, and domain registrations. In markets where business is conducted in Bahasa, Thai, or Vietnamese — and where many distributors operate without a website — these databases miss the majority of the market.
Why traditional databases fail in Southeast Asia
The gap is structural, not accidental. Traditional B2B data providers rely on web crawling and self-reported data. In Southeast Asia, many distributors are family-owned businesses that do not maintain English websites, do not have employees on LinkedIn, and do not appear in any global directory. They are, however, registered with their national government — and those registries are public.
- Singapore: ACRA (Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority) maintains a comprehensive registry of every registered business, including directors and shareholders.
- Malaysia: SSM (Suruhanjaya Syarikat Malaysia) provides company registration data, including business type, incorporation date, and director information.
- Thailand: DBD (Department of Business Development) publishes company filings, financial summaries, and shareholder structures.
- Indonesia: AHU Online (Ministry of Law and Human Rights) lists registered entities with basic corporate information.
- Vietnam: The National Business Registration Portal provides company data in Vietnamese with English translations for some fields.
These registries contain exactly the kind of data you need to identify potential distributors: company name, industry classification, registration date, director names, registered address, and sometimes revenue bands. The problem is that they are scattered across different platforms, often in local languages, and structured differently from country to country.
Step 1: Describe your target distributor profile
Open Kuration and start a new research task. In the chat interface, describe the type of distributor you are looking for. Be specific about the industry, geography, and any qualifying criteria. For example:
Find registered distributors of industrial packaging materials in Thailand and Malaysia. Companies should have been active for at least 3 years. I need the company name, registration number, director names, and registered address.
The more context you provide, the better Kuration can target the right registries and filter relevant results. You can specify product categories, minimum company age, geographic regions within a country, or specific industry codes if you know them.
Step 2: Kuration searches government registries
Once you submit your query, Kuration AI agents go to work. They identify the relevant government registries for your target countries, navigate the search interfaces, and extract structured data from the results. This includes handling local-language searches, paginated results, and registry-specific data formats.
For a typical search across two or three SEA countries, Kuration will return results within 60 to 90 seconds. The output is a structured table with company names, registration IDs, incorporation dates, industry classifications, director names, and addresses — all normalized into a consistent format regardless of which registry the data came from.
Step 3: Enrich with contact information
Government registries give you the company and its directors, but they rarely include email addresses or phone numbers. This is where Kuration enrichment comes in. Once you have your list of target distributors, use the enrichment workflow to layer on contact data.
Kuration uses waterfall enrichment across multiple data providers to find the best available contact information for each company and decision maker. This includes searching LinkedIn profiles, company websites, local business directories, and third-party data sources. For SEA markets, this multi-source approach is critical because no single provider has comprehensive coverage.
Step 4: Filter, score, and export
With your enriched list in hand, apply filters to narrow down to your best-fit prospects. You might filter by company age, number of directors (as a rough proxy for company size), geographic location within a country, or whether contact information was found. Score the remaining companies against your ideal distributor profile and export the final list to CSV or directly to your CRM.
Real-world use case: finding F&B distributors in Singapore and Malaysia
One of our customers, a European specialty food brand, needed to find food and beverage distributors across Singapore and Malaysia for a market entry initiative. Their sales team had spent two weeks manually searching and found 12 potential partners. Using Kuration, they searched ACRA and SSM registries filtered by F&B industry codes and company age. In under five minutes, they had a list of 87 registered distributors with director names and addresses. After enrichment, 62 of those had verified email addresses for at least one decision maker.
The result was a 5x increase in pipeline coverage and a market entry timeline that shortened from three months to three weeks.
Tips for getting the best results
- Be specific about industry: Government registries use local industry classification codes. The more precisely you describe your target sector, the better Kuration can match against these codes.
- Search country by country if needed: If you want to review results from each market separately, run individual queries. This lets you apply country-specific filters and scoring criteria.
- Combine registry data with other sources: For maximum coverage, run a parallel search on Google Maps or local business directories and merge the results. Companies that appear in multiple sources are typically more established.
- Use director names for LinkedIn enrichment: Even when a company has no web presence, its directors often have personal LinkedIn profiles. Kuration can use director names from registries to find and verify these profiles.
Government registries are the most reliable and comprehensive source of business data in Southeast Asia. They capture companies that no global database covers. With Kuration, you can unlock this data in minutes instead of weeks — giving you a genuine edge in markets where your competitors are still guessing.
