Editor’s Note: The following article is based on the remarks of several global CEOs and financial leaders speaking at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, where they discussed geopolitics, supply-chain fragmentation, technological disruption, and the future of globalization. The featured leaders are Georges Elhedery, Group CEO of HSBC; Lim Chow Kiat, CEO of GIC; José Muñoz, President & CEO of Hyundai Motor Co.; and Lei Zhang, Chairman of Envision.
The conversation opened with a direct and unmistakable acknowledgment of the moment the world is living through: a time in which geopolitical realignment, technological rivalry, climate transition, and economic fragmentation are not abstract risks anymore but the lived reality for corporations. The leaders gathered did not attempt to soften this. Instead, they described a global system in motion—sometimes forward, sometimes backward, but undeniably changing. Their remarks were blunt, often sobering, occasionally optimistic, and consistently anchored in the real conditions shaping corporate strategy today.
José Muñoz of Hyundai spoke first, and he wasted no time outlining the scale of disruption industries now face. As he put it plainly, “It’s a huge challenge.” For him, the forces at play—tariffs, changing regulations, the ripple effects of wars—are not episodic shocks but defining pressures that force companies to rethink every part of how they operate. “Tariffs, the change in regulation, the wars are making us really make big, big changes,” he said, giving voice to what many companies feel but rarely articulate with such clarity.
Yet, he explained that Hyundai’s culture views crisis differently from many global firms. “Part of the culture of our company is to really take every change as a great opportunity,” he said, emphasizing that this mindset traces back to Hyundai’s founder, Chung Ju-yung. This mentality, he suggested, is what allows the company not only to respond quickly but to stay focused on the long view—even when markets fluctuate violently or political landscapes shift without warning. “We are not looking at things in the short term,” he said. “We still believe electrification is here to stay and is going to continue to grow.”
Muñoz then grounded his philosophy in numbers—numbers big enough to illustrate the seriousness of the company’s commitment. Hyundai, he said, has committed $26 billion in the United States and 125 trillion Korean won (about $86 billion) over the next five years in Korea. These are not tentative steps but strategic anchors intended to fortify Hyundai against the very volatility the world is experiencing. “We are maintaining our investments,” he stressed, describing how the company is “localizing production,” “improving resilience,” and planning “for the mid to long term.”
But investment alone is not enough. Muñoz described how supply chains—the backbone of any industrial operation—are being re-engineered in real time. “You cannot afford paying 25 percent tariffs and being competitive in the market,” he said. That reality forces companies to rethink how they source, assemble, and deliver products. “You need to completely change your supply chain,” he added. “You need to invest in the local markets, improve fundamentally in your operations, improve quality, productivity, and cost competitiveness.”
To achieve this, Hyundai has turned aggressively toward automation and advanced manufacturing. Muñoz pointed to the company’s factory in Singapore as a prime example: “I am very proud to say that we are the only OEM producing here in Singapore. It’s almost an autonomous factory.” The only non-automated part of the plant, he joked, “is the management.” But that joke underscored a serious point: even with sophisticated robotics, leadership still matters, and he emphasized the importance of “rehabbing executives” so they can understand and manage new technological systems.
Muñoz repeatedly returned to the idea that the true challenge is doing all of this without halting productivity. “They are always working, always transforming,” he said of Hyundai’s plants around the world. “They can never shut down and say, ‘Hey, let’s do this quickly.’” That inability to pause forces companies to build, tear down, and rebuild simultaneously—a task few industries are equipped to handle.
After Muñoz, the conversation shifted to the global financial perspective through the voice of Georges Elhedery, Group CEO of HSBC. If Muñoz illustrated how geopolitical reordering affects industrial systems, Elhedery described how it is reshaping the very flow of global capital and trade.
“The world is reconfiguring,” he said. “Globalization is reconfiguring, and we are basically following that trend.” He rejected the narrative that globalization is dying. Instead, he suggested it is being rewritten—still cross-border, but differently structured and differently motivated. Ten years ago, Elhedery noted, global trade could be summarized simply: “China manufactures, the U.S. consumer buys.” But today, he said, “Asia buys Asia. China manufactures in the world as opposed to for the world.”
This shift has transformed trade flows. Rather than being defined by a single east-west axis, global commerce is now multi-regional and multi-centered, with Asia-Middle East integration emerging as a particularly powerful engine. “With more integration within this wider region,” he said, “we will add 1.8 percent to GDP.” Meanwhile, U.S. tariffs may reduce growth by around 0.5 percent. His point was clear: despite tension between major powers, new trade corridors are expanding, not contracting.
When asked whether HSBC’s confidence in globalization was simply the inertia of a 160-year-old institution, Elhedery dismissed the idea. “We are investing where we are seeing growth,” he said. “This is not nostalgia. This is where the numbers lead us.”
Lim Chow Kiat, the CEO of GIC, followed by emphasizing the investment perspective in an increasingly fragmented world. For institutional investors, he said, the core challenge is unpredictability. “The world is much more complex,” he noted. “We need to prepare for a much wider range of outcomes.” He described a new era in which risk management is not just about hedging financial volatility but navigating geopolitical conflict, technological bifurcation, supply-chain nationalism, and climate transition.
Lim emphasized that GIC is responding by diversifying risk across asset classes, geographies, and time horizons. But he also warned that fragmentation carries real economic costs. “We will have to pay more for resilience,” he said. That cost—borne by governments, companies, and consumers—could translate into slower global growth, higher structural inflation, and more uneven development. Yet he remained firm that the only responsible approach is to adjust. “We must be ready for surprises,” he said, “and ready to act when they come.”
Lei Zhang, Chairman of Envision, brought the conversation into the terrain of climate transition and technology. His remarks focused on the urgency and the complexity of the transition toward clean energy. He warned that decarbonization goals cannot be met unless countries work together despite geopolitical divides. “Climate change does not have a nationality,” he said. “We have to collaborate, otherwise we fail together.”
Lei stressed that the clean-energy ecosystem—batteries, storage, renewables, grid technology—depends on global cooperation and intricate supply chains. Fragmentation, he argued, could set back global climate goals by decades. He highlighted that energy transition technologies are often cross-border by necessity: minerals from one region, processing in another, manufacturing in a third, and adoption in a fourth. “If we cut these links,” he warned, “we will have higher costs, slower innovation, and delayed progress.” For him, the biggest risk is that geopolitical rivalry overrides scientific and technological cooperation.
Despite the challenges, Lei insisted there is reason for hope. The pace of innovation, he said, is accelerating more quickly than many realize. “We need to be optimistic,” he urged. “Technology is moving fast, and if we can align incentives, we can solve these problems.” His optimism, however, came with a condition: that countries avoid turning climate technologies into tools of geopolitical conflict.
As the dialogue developed, several themes emerged consistently across all four leaders. The first was localization. Whether in manufacturing, finance, or renewables, the world’s largest firms are being pushed toward building local or regional production ecosystems. This, they agreed, is both costly and necessary.
The second was resilience as a strategic asset. Companies can no longer optimize solely for efficiency; they must build buffers, redundancies, and alternative capacities. As Lim put it, resilience now has a price—one that economies must be prepared to pay.
The third was technology as the defining competitive frontier. Automation, artificial intelligence, robotics, electrification, advanced materials, and clean-energy systems are reshaping industries faster than regulation or governance structures can keep up. Muñoz’s description of an autonomous factory in Singapore is one example; Lei’s call for global alignment on clean-energy technology is another.
The fourth was a shared belief that globalization is not ending, but transforming. Elhedery’s framing—“Asia buys Asia”—captured a fundamental truth: trade is not collapsing, it is reorganizing.
Finally, there was a sense that leadership in this era is fundamentally different. Companies must move faster, anticipate more, and engage more directly with governments. As Muñoz put it, executives now spend more time speaking to policymakers than at any point in the past. Business, geopolitics, and national strategy are increasingly intertwined.
