Southeast Asia’s (SEA) private 5G network market was worth around $83 million in 2021. An industry report pegs it at $1.9 billion by 2030, which implies a compound annual growth rate of nearly 42 per cent. That growth is coming from ports, factories, mines and hospitals across the region, because the equipment they now run – robotic cranes and sensors tracking equipment in real time – cannot tolerate the kind of dropped connection a public mobile network occasionally delivers.
Operator economics
The surge has as much to do with what telcos need as with what enterprises want. Consumer 5G in SEA has not paid off the way operators expected. SEA’s 5G penetration rate still trails the global average and telcos have already spent heavily on spectrum and towers without seeing matching returns from data plans. Private networks give operators a way out of that maths. Instead of competing on thin retail margins, a telco can sign one long-term contract with a single mine or factory and earn more from that one site than from thousands of retail customers put together. Enterprise customers are also stickier. Once a company has built its automation around a private network, walking away means rebuilding operations, not just switching a phone plan; so the contracts tend to last.
Regulation is the third piece. Some governments have started setting aside spectrum specifically for enterprise use, which turns private 5G from something a company has to negotiate through an operator into something it can simply buy or build. Where that has happened, adoption has moved faster.
Regional build-out
In Singapore, Singtel has worked with Ericsson to build Tuas port’s 5G network, the city state’s new mega port, using a dedicated slice of the public network for general automation and separate private networks for critical grade port operations. Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) went live from 2025, with the port expected to eventually handle 65 million 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) per year. Coverage supports the AGVs alongside remote controlled cranes and drone surveillance for spotting equipment problems before they cause downtime.
In Indonesia, Telkomsel and ZTE announced, in November 2025, what they describe as the world’s first UE-transparent hybrid private network, fully deployed at a leading automotive production facility in Karawang, West Java. Rather than building a fully independent private network or relying on network slicing of the public network, the two companies used an IMSI-based mechanism that automatically switches and isolates private and public devices on the same public radio infrastructure, cutting deployment time from months to hours and reducing costs by more than half. XL Smart, at the UPTIME 2026 conference in March 2026, described private 5G deployments that have been built across mining, ports, manufacturing, and oil and gas, including a South Kalimantan open pit mine where a private network now allows workers to operate bulldozers in tailing pond areas from a control room several kilometres away, keeping operators out of some of the harshest conditions on site.
In Vietnam, Viettel trialled a 5G private mobile network at a Pegatron factory in Haiphong in July 2023, making it the first factory in the country to run automation over 5G. That initial phase covered applications including public cloud computing, assembly stations, product testing and production supervision, aimed at real-time data collection, better efficiency and reducing occupational hazards on the floor. The rest of the market is still building towards that point. As of January 2026, VNPT’s technology division is piloting private networks for higher education and smart factories, and is separately planning private 5G for airport and port customers in Tay Ninh and Haiphong.
In Thailand, Nokia and NTT announced a partnership in mid-2023 to bring private 5G to more than 3.2 million enterprises across the country, covering use cases such as video analytics, digital twins, machine vision and industrial IoT alongside automation and robotics. The following year, in May 2024, Midea, AIS, China Unicom and Huawei jointly built what they call the first fully 5G-connected factory in SEA at Midea’s industrial park in Chonburi. A dedicated private 5G network spanned three production plants across 160,000 square metres, running AGVs, AI-based inspection that cut rework rates by 75 per cent and robotic arms controlled remotely by workers over 5G smartphones. On the policy side, Thailand’s regulator, NBTC, announced in September 2025 that it plans to release 100 MHz of the 4800 MHz band under a dedicated private network operator licence, free of charge to factories and enterprises for internal, non-commercial use.
In Malaysia, Petronas launched the country’s first commercial private 5G network for enterprise use in October 2023, at its regasification terminal, Sungai Udang, in Melaka. The company said the network would optimise internal operations and induce industry-wide change, and it has since been expanded to its LNG Complex in Bintulu, Sarawak, bringing the total to four Petronas sites now running on private 5G. In March 2026, DNB and PROTON Institute launched Malaysia’s first TVET-based private 5G training lab in Melaka, giving vocational students hands-on access to enterprise-grade 5G networks to prepare them for careers in automation, robotics and smart manufacturing. Moreover, the Malaysian government’s National Digital Network plan, JENDELA, and subsequent 5G implementation programmes have the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission issuing spectrum assignments and apparatus licences that let operators and enterprises deploy private LTE and 5G networks across manufacturing, ports, healthcare and smart cities.
Cost considerations
Some of the region’s markets are at very different stages of the 5G adoption curve. Brunei officially launched commercial 5G mobile services in June 2023. While Cambodia only began commercial 5G services in January 2026. Laos has commercially deployed 5G, but coverage remains concentrated in selected locations and has yet to reach nationwide scale. Myanmar, meanwhile, has conducted 5G trials but has not yet progressed to a nationwide commercial rollout. In markets at these earlier stages of 5G development, operators and enterprises are still focused on expanding basic 5G availability and coverage, which can limit the near-term development of private 5G opportunities.
Cost is a real constraint even where the network exists. A market estimate puts the cost of deploying a typical private 5G network in SEA at roughly $430,000 to $685,000 over five years, with 54-58 per cent of that total driven by capital expenditure alone, meaning the upfront hardware and infrastructure spend dominates the bill well before any operational savings start showing up. That is a number most small- and mid-sized enterprises in the region cannot easily justify without a very clear return on investment case already worked out.
In sum
As companies keep shifting production into the region, factories, ports and industrial parks need connectivity that can actually support automation, AI-driven quality checks, autonomous vehicles and digital twins. Public Wi-Fi and legacy wiring were not built for that. Private 5G increasingly is. Which is why it is becoming a real piece of Industry 4.0 plans in export-heavy economies trying to stay competitive globally.
How fast this moves depends on governments making deployment easier and cheaper, through dedicated spectrum, simpler licensing and the right incentives. If that continues to improve, SEA has a real shot at becoming one of the more interesting private 5G markets in the world.
