Executive Summary

• In our 2026 outlook for South and Southeast Asian (S&SEA) and Middle East Corporates, we highlight macroeconomic trends, corporate performance, potential new issue candidates for next year, and 2026 fundamental outlooks for indivdual companies categorised by industries.

• We provide our in-depth 2026 outlooks for the weak HY or “special sits” credits including Vedanta, SMC Global Power, Indika Energy, Genting Bhd, Genting Malaysia, and Biocon Biologics.

• We expect Improving or Stable-Improving credit outlooks for companies in the consumer foods, steelmaking, telecom, transportation (seaports and airports), Stable or Mixed credit outlooks for Indian renewables, power utilities and metals and mining sectors and a Stable-Deteriorating credit outlooks for oil & gas sector.

• We have also made a few recommendation changes and highlight our key picks and pans including security-level preferences or dislikes.

• We expect the S&SEA and Saudi Arabian economies to broadly remain resilient even with US tariffs inevitably posing headwinds to exports growth in 2026, though Thailand remains the laggard in the region and Philippines could face challenges.

• S&SEA corporate $ new issuance picked up YoY in YTD 2025 to $13.5 bn (2024: $10.8 bn), and we expect new $ issuance to grow further in 2026 across all IG/HY/unrated buckets; notable candidates include Greenko, JSW Steel, Medco Energi, SMC GP, Thai Oil, ReNew Power and Saudi Aramco.