A Singapore-based long/short equity hedge fund was building a position in the Southeast Asian consumer sector. The thesis centred on a specific category within fast-moving consumer goods, with the fund evaluating both long and short opportunities across publicly listed companies with significant exposure to Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.
The fund's investment team had done extensive secondary research. They had the macro picture. They understood the published competitive dynamics and the financial profiles of the key listed players. What they did not have was conviction on the ground-level questions that would determine whether their thesis held up under real market conditions.
Three questions in particular required primary research. First, how was the category actually performing at the point of sale in each market, independent of what the listed companies were reporting? Second, how were the competitive dynamics between domestic operators and multinational incumbents actually shifting in ways that the financial statements lagged? Third, what was the realistic timeline for margin recovery in each market given current input cost dynamics and promotional intensity?
These were not questions that any published source, analyst report, or AI synthesis tool could answer with the specificity required. They were operational questions that required access to people who had managed businesses inside these exact market conditions.
Konnect received the brief and ran simultaneous outreach across all three markets. The team prioritised three specific practitioner profiles: former commercial leads at FMCG companies with direct experience managing the category in question, trade marketing and category management executives who had worked with major modern trade operators in each market, and supply chain specialists with current knowledge of input cost dynamics and logistics economics in each geography.
The fund's compliance team had specific requirements around MNPI screening and documentation. Konnect's compliance framework was applied to every expert before outreach: conflict of interest screening, NDA execution, and pre-call compliance reminders were completed as standard before any session was scheduled.
Within 48 hours of receiving the brief, Konnect had confirmed practitioners for all three markets. The fund's research team was conducting expert calls within four days of the initial brief.
The expert sessions across Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand produced intelligence that materially shifted the fund's conviction level on several components of the thesis.
A former commercial director with direct experience managing the specific category across Java and Sumatra provided granular detail on how shelf velocity was performing across modern trade formats relative to the published numbers. The gap between reported distributor sell-in and actual consumer sell-through at retail was a specific concern in the thesis. The practitioner's on-the-ground perspective confirmed the fund's concern was directionally correct, and provided the qualitative colour needed to size the position conservatively on the long side.
A former category management head with direct modern trade experience provided the fund with a realistic picture of how promotional intensity was actually tracking in the category across major hypermarket operators. The intelligence surfaced that promotional spend normalisation was occurring more slowly than the listed company's forward guidance implied, a finding that affected the fund's margin recovery timeline assumptions on both the long and short sides.
A practitioner with direct supply chain and procurement experience in the Thai FMCG sector provided current intelligence on input cost dynamics that had not yet been reflected in published commodity data. The fund's thesis had assumed a specific input cost trajectory over the following two quarters. The practitioner's perspective indicated the trajectory was more volatile than the thesis assumed, prompting the team to adjust its position sizing on the short leg accordingly.
"The sessions changed three specific assumptions in our model. Not the direction of the thesis, but the confidence interval around the timing and the magnitude. That is exactly what primary research is supposed to do."
Portfolio Manager, Singapore-based Long/Short Equity Hedge Fund
The fund completed primary research across all three markets within five days of the initial brief. The expert sessions produced specific adjustments to the fund's margin recovery timeline assumptions, position sizing on both the long and short legs, and the monitoring framework the team used to track whether the thesis was playing out as expected.
The fund proceeded to build positions across the Southeast Asian consumer sector with a materially higher level of conviction and a more precisely calibrated risk framework than the secondary research alone had produced.
For Singapore-based investment teams conducting research across Southeast Asian markets, the ability to access sector practitioners across multiple geographies simultaneously, within a compliant framework and on a timeline that matches investment decision cycles, is what makes expert networks an operational necessity rather than an optional supplement.
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