ASEAN Sets Its Sights on Antitrust: The 2026–2030 Competition Roadmap

Amid the headline trade and geopolitical announcements from the 48th ASEAN Summit, a quieter initiative emerged that could matter more over time: a new Roadmap on Competition and Consumer Protection covering 2026 to 2030, aimed at building real cross-border coordination among the bloc’s ten national competition authorities.

The roadmap’s stated goals are to strengthen institutional capacity, build up regulators’ professional expertise, and, most relevant for businesses working across multiple ASEAN markets, improve cross-border cooperation between national authorities. Right now, each of ASEAN’s ten member states runs its own competition and antitrust regime, with wide differences in enforcement maturity, procedure, and merger notification thresholds. A company completing a regional acquisition today can face ten separate merger control processes, each with its own timeline, paperwork, and legal test.

The roadmap doesn’t create a single ASEAN merger control regime along the lines of the EU’s centralised model. That’s still a distant prospect, given ASEAN’s consensus-based decision-making and the wide gaps in economic development and regulatory maturity among members. What it does signal is a real institutional push toward more coherence over time, potentially through harmonised notification thresholds, shared case-handling protocols, and more consistent standards for assessing dominance and anti-competitive conduct.

For legal and M&A advisers, the practical effect over the next few years will likely be gradual rather than dramatic. Early priorities under the roadmap look focused on capacity-building: training, technical assistance, and information-sharing between authorities, rather than binding legal harmonisation. But the direction matters for long-term deal planning. Companies structuring multi-jurisdictional ASEAN transactions with completion timelines running into 2028 or beyond should account for the possibility of evolving notification requirements and closer coordination between regulators, which could change timing and information-sharing risk compared with today’s largely siloed approach.

The initiative also fits a broader pattern: ASEAN’s economic integration tends to move through roadmaps, guidelines, and voluntary frameworks rather than binding treaties, which is how much of the bloc’s economic policy coordination has worked over the past two decades. Whether the competition roadmap actually produces convergence, the way earlier initiatives in areas like data protection have done with mixed results, will depend on sustained political commitment across several future ASEAN chairmanships.

In summary: ASEAN’s new 2026–2030 Competition and Consumer Protection Roadmap is an early but genuine institutional push toward cross-border coherence in antitrust enforcement across the bloc’s ten member states. Binding harmonisation is still a long way off, but companies planning multi-jurisdictional ASEAN transactions in the coming years should track its implementation, since it will shape how merger control practice develops across the region.