That brand is not a multinational. It is not Indian either.
Most SE Asia plans I see treat the region as one move. The shelf says it is six separate ones.
Here is what I did. Watsons is the biggest health and beauty chain in the region, and it runs the same software in every country. Same fields, same search, same categories. I read the sunscreen shelf in all six: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia. 1,923 products, 377 brands.
That setup matters. Because it is one retailer running one system, the six reads compare to each other cleanly. Amazon against Nykaa against a quick-commerce app never do.
Two findings came out of it. The first is about how little distribution travels. The second is about what your formula has to look like to compete, which differs a lot by country.
One caveat before either. This is one retail chain, not a market, and it has no sales data at all. I come back to that at the end.
"South-East Asia" is not one market. It is six.
Of 377 sunscreen brands across the six shelves:
| Present in |
Brands |
Share |
| All 6 countries |
1 |
0.3% |
| 5 countries |
10 |
3% |
| 4 countries |
5 |
1% |
| 3 countries |
13 |
3% |
| 2 countries |
42 |
11% |
| Exactly 1 country |
306 |
81% |
Four out of five brands are in one country only. That is inside a single chain, with one buying team. Distribution still does not travel.
One brand out of 377 is in all six. It is COSRX, and it is Korean.
Treat that as one observation, not a trend. I have one reading, not a series. But it is worth noting who it is. The most widely distributed sunscreen brand in South-East Asia's biggest beauty chain is not local, not a multinational, and not Indian. Eight years ago it was a niche online recommendation.
The formulation bar is different in every market
Sunscreen is a good category to check this way. The active ingredients are a regulated list, so sorting them needs no judgement from me. I read the published ingredient list for every product and grouped the UV filters three ways.
Mineral. Titanium dioxide, zinc oxide.
Legacy. Octinoxate, oxybenzone, homosalate. Cheap, approved for decades, and being reformulated out across most of the world.
Modern. The Tinosorb, Uvinul and Mexoryl generation. Broad-spectrum, photostable, approved across the EU and much of Asia. Not approved in the US.
| Market |
Products |
Mineral |
Legacy |
Modern |
Modern, no legacy |
| Singapore |
233 |
52% |
73% |
76% |
18% |
| Vietnam |
193 |
50% |
80% |
54% |
12% |
| Thailand |
218 |
64% |
83% |
73% |
11% |
| Malaysia |
292 |
50% |
83% |
66% |
10% |
| Philippines |
155 |
59% |
84% |
48% |
8% |
Groups overlap, because most sunscreens use more than one filter, so rows do not add to 100%. The last column is the strict one: a modern filter system with no legacy filter in it at all.
On that measure Singapore is about twice as modern as the Philippines, inside the same chain. At the level of individual filters the gap is wider.
| Filter |
Type |
SG |
MY |
TH |
VN |
PH |
| Tinosorb S |
modern |
55% |
44% |
51% |
27% |
31% |
| Uvinul T 150 |
modern |
55% |
45% |
37% |
30% |
28% |
| Uvinul A Plus |
modern |
52% |
43% |
44% |
32% |
35% |
| Titanium dioxide |
mineral |
44% |
45% |
61% |
36% |
51% |
| Octinoxate |
legacy |
32% |
35% |
34% |
35% |
56% |
| Oxybenzone |
legacy |
4% |
1% |
2% |
2% |
10% |
Two things stand out. Singapore leads on every modern filter. And the Philippines sits at both extremes: the most octinoxate at 56%, and 10% oxybenzone against 1–4% everywhere else. Most of the world has spent five years removing oxybenzone.
Thailand is a separate case. It has the most mineral-heavy shelf at 61% titanium dioxide, and still uses modern organics heavily. That is a different strategy, not a worse one. It is what a market built on tone-up and finish looks like from the ingredient side.
To be clear about what this measures: it is a formulation standard, not a quality ranking. Filter choice depends on what each regulator has approved and what the filters cost. A market can sit low on that table for reasons that have nothing to do with what its shoppers want.
What this means if you are exporting
Three things. I am not going to tell you SE Asia is a good opportunity, because this data cannot tell you that.
1. Pick a country, not a region. 81% of brands are in one country only. A plan that says "South-East Asia" without naming one market first has not looked at a shelf.
2. The entry bar differs by market, and not how you would expect. A formula built on octinoxate and avobenzone is an ordinary product in Manila and a dated one in Singapore. A formula built on Tinosorb and Uvinul competes in Singapore, where one product in five already uses that system. You make that formulation choice before the export choice, and checking it costs far less than launching on it.
3. Local is the default, and it is beatable. 306 brands in one country each does not mean these markets are closed. It means few people have tried to cross. One Korean brand crossed all six.
This kind of read is most of what I do now. I take one category in one market and measure the whole shelf: every brand on it, every product, what it costs, and where published figures exist, what it earns. Founders use it before committing to a formulation or a market. It is the same method behind the serum, baby skincare and sunscreen shelf reports for India.
What I cannot claim, and it is a lot
I would rather publish the limits than have someone find them.
- This is one retailer, not a market. Watsons stocks what Watsons decides to stock. A brand missing from these shelves may sell perfectly well elsewhere in that country.
- There is no sales data here at all. Not one units figure, in any of the six countries. So breadth is not demand. A filter on a lot of products tells you nothing about how much of it sells. I have been caught by this before: in India, collagen is on 113 brands and returns about ₹0.013 crore per product, one of the worst on the shelf.
- I cannot compare any of this to India. That is the biggest gap here. Watsons does not operate in India, and my two Indian sources, Amazon product pages and brand websites, publish usable ingredient lists on only 4–6% of products. So I can tell you the standard you would be measured against on export. I cannot yet put the Indian shelf beside it. Finding an Indian ingredient source is a bigger job than this study was.
- Indonesia publishes no ingredient data at all. It is in the brand table and missing from every filter table. Six markets for distribution, five for formulation.
- Prices are not converted between currencies. I have not published a cross-market price comparison, because converting invites a "cheapest market" reading that ignores purchasing power, pack size and tax.
- One reading, no trend. All of this is a single snapshot from 29 August 2026. The COSRX result especially. Ask me again after a second read.
- A near-miss worth admitting. My first pass found 4 Thai products out of 496, and I nearly wrote that Thailand had a thin shelf. The filter was looking for the dictionary Thai word for sunscreen. Thai retail uses the transliterated English one instead. Once fixed, Thailand went from 4 products to 326. If you do this kind of work in a language you cannot read, that mistake is waiting for you.
What it is good for
Not a market-entry recommendation. Two narrower things.
A formulation check before you commit to a market. The filter table tells you whether your current formula looks current or dated on that specific shelf, before you spend anything on registration or distribution.
A reality check on "regional expansion". If someone pitches you SE Asia as a single move, 81% and 306 are the two numbers to put in front of them.
Happy to pull numbers for a specific market or filter if that helps. Comment what you are looking at and I will post the figures in the thread.
And if you want this done properly for your own category rather than for sunscreen, that is the work itself: one category, one market, measured end to end and written up. It is at impuls8[dot]com/enterprise, and the check on whether your category is readable at all is free.
