Get A Ringside View On Giti Tire’s EV-Powered Race To Catch Up With The World’s Leading Tiremakers

As an eventful 2025 draws to a close, it’s worth reflecting on its biggest moments. Few pundits could have predicted that this year would bring us a new spectator sport: trade policy. The muscular tariff regime of Trump 2.0 unleashed turmoil that governments and businesses around the world scrambled to address. Some were better prepared than others, such as the protagonist of our cover story, former medical doctor Enki Tan, now executive chairman of Singapore-headquartered Giti Tire, a tiremaker with Indonesian roots.

Tan’s global ambitions for Giti (pronounced “GT”) spurred him to invest $560 million in building a U.S. factory in 2017 to be closer to the company’s American customers. In another prescient move, Tan went all out to sharpen Giti’s technological edge in a growing segment of the market: tires for electric vehicles. In September, Chinese EV giant BYD’s new electric hypercar, sporting Giti’s wheels, notched a speed record of nearly 500 kilometers per hour to become the world’s fastest production car. As Tan disclosed to our contributing editor Ardian Wibisono, tires these days are loaded with much more than meets the eye: “I have people telling me, ‘Hey, they’re very easy to make. You just pour the rubber inside the mold and then the tire comes out.’ It’s not so easy.”

Indeed, it wasn’t an easy year either for the tycoons on the accompanying list of Indonesia’s 50 Richest as a spell of civil unrest marked by street protests made investors skittish. Despite the uncertainty, the benchmark stock index was up by double-digits, resulting in the combined wealth of the country’s richest, ably compiled by our wealth team, crossing $300 billion.

Scaling up to the billion-dollar valuation mark is an uncommon feat for companies in New Zealand. One among a handful of Kiwi unicorns is agritech firm Halter, profiled by our reporter Catherine Wang. Halter’s founder and CEO Craig Piggott, who grew up on his parents’ dairy farm in Matamata, a town immortalized as a filming location of Lord of the Rings, created a solar-powered smart collar for cows to help farmers manage their herds through virtual fencing technology. An alum of our 30 Under 30 Asia list of young achievers (class of 2021), Piggott is looking further afield to the U.S. as Halter’s next growth market.

In a month that marks the season of giving, we present a selection of Asia-Pacific’s notable givers in our annual Heroes of Philanthropy list. This unranked group, curated by a team led by editorial director Rana Wehbe Watson, spotlights wealthy individuals and families backing worthy causes, such as supporting young women studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

To round up the philanthropy theme is a stateside story about billionaire couple Cari Tuna, a former journalist, and her husband, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, who are giving away the bulk of their multibillion-dollar fortune as fast as they can. Their charity, Coefficient Giving, backs a range of causes, such as AI safety research.

As the year turns, a heads-up about what we should brace for: Speed of Change, the theme of our Forbes Global CEO Conference to be held in Singapore in the fourth quarter of 2026. As always comments welcome at executiveeditor@forbesasia.com.