Op-Ed: Forging APB in the crucible of Asian Financial Crisis

By Andrew Yeo

It seems like yesterday that I bought Asia-Pacific Broadcasting (APB) magazine from Miller Freeman with a plan to relaunch it as a trade tabloid for professionals working in the broadcast industry in Asia. Actually, it was June 1997, a quarter of a century ago.

While I enjoyed working as a journalist at Singapore’s Business Times in the late 1970s and the next 10 years with Asian Business Press in B2B publications, I was not really prepared for what hit me the following month — in July 1997, the Thai baht collapse, followed by the Indonesian rupiah and the contagion spiralled into the Asian Financial Crisis, wreaking havoc on economies in the whole region.

Should I abort APB?

One of my staff pointed to the two Chinese characters “Wei Ji”  hanging in my office. She reminded me that in every Crisis there is an Opportunity.

The crisis took me two years to realise my plan to launch APB as a news tabloid; finally, it was launched at IBC 1999 in conjunction with a CEO Roundtable that APB organised for 11 Asian broadcasters visiting the convention in Amsterdam.

With the firm belief that sooner or later Asia-Pacific countries would move up the broadcast technology ladder, I persuaded my wife to re-mortgage our house to obtain the financial resources required to build up APB into a trusted source of information to provide news our readers in Asia can use.

Over the years until 2020, my team and I faithfully attended NAB, IBC, InterBEE, BroadcastAsia and many other trade shows in the region to update ourselves and monitor media trends and technologies. It was headlines and deadlines, news, views and interviews that kept us going.

We enjoyed learning and sharing, organising annual ConneXxion Forums, friendly golf games and also visiting clients’ factories. In the process, we made some great friends in the industry and gained strong support in return.

However, with the convergence of technologies the broadcast landscape began to change. The most profound development affecting the media industry was the emergence of digital technology. Software-defined solutions slowly but surely impacted traditional business models. Going digital was no more an option but a matter of survival. Work processes and people began to change.

And in 2020, when COVID-19 started to spread, business travel curtailed, budgets to upgrade TV infrastructures in Asia cut, WFH (work from home) became the norm, I decided to engage Ms Karen Ralls-Tan, a new media practitioner, as my publishing director to help transform APB to APB+ so as to embrace CRM and social media to reach out to readers and advertisers.

As the 4^th Industrial Revolution is already upon us, we must indeed embrace new technologies, new ways of working and engaging our readers and stakeholders.

While I continue to enjoy helming APB+ and meeting friends, old and new, the time has come for me to hand over the publication to a more socially-savvy publisher — and also to keep my promise to my wife who supported me through thick and thin. I once promised her that I would retire, or at least semi-retire, at age 65, then parlayed with her to 67, 70, then 72 … and now I’m 76!

Today, I am happy to announce the new publisher of APB+. He is none other than Tim Charlton, the founder of Charlton Media.