Southeast Asia’s Muslim market comes of age—and authenticity is in

Southeast Asia is showing signs of a potential consumer boom. Incomes in the region have been on the rise, partly owing to increasing foreign investment as global corporations look to reorganize their supply chains. The area’s increasingly affluent population is also quite young: Its median age of around 30.4 years is considerably younger than that of the U.S., Europe, or China.

This fast-rising group has another distinctive characteristic: About 40% of Southeast Asia’s population, roughly 281 million people, are Muslim, based on Fortune calculations using World Bank data and census figures. And that particular demographic is fast becoming a key consumer group, as both local companies and established multinationals grow even more sensitive to their needs.

The Muslim consumer market in Southeast Asia spreads across Singapore, Brunei, the Philippines, and Thailand. But its largest hubs are in Malaysia, where about 64% of the population identifies as Muslim, and Indonesia, home to more Muslims than any other country—about 242 million, according to 2023 census figures.

The middle class in the Islamic community has been steadily expanding, according to Afra Alatas, a research officer who studies Muslim societies in Southeast Asia for Singapore think tank ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute. And as this group of consumers grows richer, Afra notes, “Muslim consumers—particularly those in the middle class—increasingly desire a more ‘Islamic’ lifestyle.”

Afra says this desire is manifest in a growing demand for goods and services that are halal (that is, permissible under Islam). It’s fueling a boom in companies that offer halal-certified non-consumable goods like cosmetics; “modest fashion,” which reflects Islamic values of modesty while still being stylish; and tourism packages.

Globally, Muslim consumers spent $2.29 trillion on halal products and services in 2022, up 41% from $1.62 trillion in 2012, per research from Salaam Gateway, a Dubai-headquartered organization that tracks the global Islamic economy. That total is forecasted to rise to $3.1 trillion by 2027—making observant Muslims a market that few companies in any region can afford to ignore.

“When we divide the world population by religions, the Muslim population is increasing the most,” says Cédomir Nestorovic, a professor at the ESSEC Business School in Singapore who focuses on Islamic business and management. World Bank data shows that many Muslim-majority countries have moved from low-income to middle-income status—including Indonesia and Malaysia.

“The demographics are clearly on the side of Muslim people,” Nestorovic says.

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One of the biggest Muslim-consumer success stories in the region is Wardah, an Indonesian cosmetics and personal care brand that makes halal cosmetics.

Many non-practitioners of Islam are aware of the concept of halal as it applies to food and beverages: Observant Muslims are called upon to avoid pork and eschew alcohol, and halal butchers are obliged to slaughter animals in a cruelty free manner. Those concepts, it turns out, are quite relevant when it comes to beauty products, where the use of alcohol (in perfume) and of collagen or gelatin from pigs (in facial products) is not uncommon, and where testing products on animals is often controversial.

Wardah observes these laws and avoids any additives that would be haram (impermissible). Founded in 1995, the company began to see meaningful growth from about 2005, according to Sari Chairunnisa, deputy CEO and vice president of research and development at Paragon Technology and Innovation, Wardah’s parent company. (Sari is also the daughter of Paragon’s founder, Nurhayati Subakat.)

The company was held back in its early years by the fact that regional consumers had less disposable income and lacked knowledge about the availability of halal products, Sari says. And Wardah’s own products needed improvement, she adds: It took time to master the art of making higher-quality lipsticks and foundation that proved durable and long-lasting.

Wardah is a private company and doesn’t publicly report its revenue, but says it currently holds about 30% of Indonesia’s beauty market, which includes personal care and cosmetics. It also sells its products in Malaysia and Brunei.

But Wardah is hardly the only Indonesian brand to find success among Muslim consumers. “Modest fashion” company Buttonscarves, a startup founded in 2016, now has physical stores across Indonesia and Malaysia, and an online store that serves the rest of Southeast Asia and global customers. It found a market gap where few designers catered to “contemporary Muslim women,” according to founder and CEO Linda Anggrea. “I wanted to build something that not only met the fashion needs of Muslim women but also gave them a sense of confidence,” she says. “There weren’t many brands that combined premium quality and design.”

Anggrea started with a single product—scarves—and has since moved into selling clothing and other accessories. Buttonscarves is now the flagship in a group of eight brands that fall under the umbrella of the Modinity Group; a company spokesperson says Modinity earned revenue of $80 million to $100 million for 2024.

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Rising incomes aren’t the only factor driving the rise of the Muslim consumer in Southeast Asia; technology and government initiatives have also played a role.

In this region, as elsewhere in the world, smartphones have changed the consumer landscape as they’ve become more accessible. The proliferation of technology allows Muslim entrepreneurs to promote halal products, and social media has increasingly enabled companies to lean on influencers to market their wares.

“Religious preachers, online influencers, and Muslim entrepreneurs use their platforms to market their products—and in some cases to explain or justify their permissibility according to religious precepts—to their followers,” says Afra, the researcher in Singapore.

Anggrea of Buttonscarves says her business has benefited from the changing perception of modest fashion in the past decade. Social media influencers who advocate modest fashion have shown that wearing a hijab is something that can also be fashionable; so, too, have widely promoted fashion shows. If you’re an observant Muslim woman, “you can be as stylish as you want,” Anggrea says.

But government initiatives are arguably an even bigger driver for the adoption of a halal economy. Much like governments in the Middle East, those of Muslim majority countries like Indonesia and Malaysia have introduced various policies to promote the halal economy or greater compliance with sharia, or Islamic law, by businesses.

Consider that Indonesia wants all cosmetics sold in the country to be halal certified from October of next year. The move stems from the Halal Product Assurance law of 2014, which requires products like food, cosmetics, and apparel to be halal-certified. Regulation like this arguably benefits companies like Wardah that already have a head start in ensuring product compliance and have built up trust among the community. (Non-Muslims, of course, can and do also buy halal products.)

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Consumer banking, too, has become more proactive in serving the Muslim community. Islamic finance is already big business in the Middle East, driven by economies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In Southeast Asia, Malaysia is the leading economy for Islamic finance. Malaysia’s government first began promoting the sector as an alternative to the conventional finance system following the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s. Interest in Islamic finance offerings gained traction again after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008: Islamic banks were viewed as more robust and safer than conventional banks because they didn’t trade in junk bonds or take part in short-selling or speculation—all seen as factors that had destabilized the global financial system.

In order to be sharia-compliant, banks must avoid investments in companies whose products do harm; they are also obligated to avoid companies that make or sell haram products like pork or alcohol. More significantly, Islamic banking can’t rely on interest payments, which are barred under some interpretations of Islamic law.

Malaysia’s biggest bank, Maybank, is the parent company of the Asia-Pacific region’s largest Islamic financial operation. Maybank, as a group, has banking services more often associated with traditional finance. But Islamic banking contributed about 28% to the group’s pretax profits. Maybank Group reported revenues of $14.2 billion in 2023, placing it at No. 17 on the Fortune Southeast Asia 500.

“From a Muslim perspective, if I invest or save money and I get an interest, it’s very difficult for them to accept. We want to ease that,” says Dato Muzaffar Hisham, who oversees the group’s Islamic finance operations.

While interest is forbidden, there are still sharia-compliant methods to grow wealth. Among them is the financial principle of murabaha. This involves a bank customer purchasing an approved sharia-compliant asset and selling that asset to the bank at an agreed-upon marked-up price. The markup takes the place of the interest that would be involved in a traditional fixed deposit. (A similar process is used when a customer seeks financing options.)

Islamic finance in Southeast Asia amounted to roughly $859 billion in 2023, up from $754 billion in 2020, according to the latest study by the Islamic Corporation for the Development of the Private Sector and the London Stock Exchange Group. The total global market for Islamic finance was estimated to be worth around $4.9 trillion in 2023.

Muzaffar sees an opportunity for Maybank to further expand from Malaysia into Indonesia either through wealth management or financing as the population becomes wealthier.

Maybank’s Islamic banking window through Unit Usaha Syariah PT Bank Maybank Indonesia grew its assets by 4.7% year on year in 2024 to reach 42.96 trillion rupiah ($2.6 billion) and contributed about 25% to Maybank Indonesia’s total assets. Its Islamic banking window made up about 5% of Maybank Indonesia’s total assets 10 years ago.

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To be sure, many multinationals have long been playing to the Muslim community. The food and beverage sector has been the front-runner in this space, according to Nilakshi Medhi, head of strategic planning at advertising giant Publicis’ Indonesia office. Not only do these companies ensure halal
certification, but chains like McDonald’s and KFC introduce special menu
offerings during Ramadan, along with pre- and post-fasting meals.

Big beauty and fashion brands like L’Oréal of France and Sweden’s H&M have also made efforts to cater to the growing Muslim consumer class with halal cosmetics and modest fashion apparel in specific markets. Even travel platforms are now offering packages that ensure compliance with halal standards in accommodations and food in a bid to capture a share of a values-driven market.

Islamic consumers have made their buying power known in other ways—such as withholding their dollars from companies over political disputes. The recent conflict in Gaza has provided one vivid example.

Activists in both the Islamic world and the West called for boycotts as a way to take a stand against what they saw as unjust treatment of Palestinians in Gaza by Israel and some brands’ perceived complicity in that mistreatment. Last October, Unilever’s Indonesia unit reported an 18% drop in revenue for its third quarter to 8.4 trillion rupiah ($533 million). The conglomerate previously said that its growth in Southeast Asia had been hurt by shoppers in Indonesia who were engaged in geopolitically focused consumer-facing campaigns.

Berjaya Food, which franchises Starbucks coffee shops in Malaysia, has taken a particularly sharp hit from boycotts. Starbucks doesn’t currently operate in Israel, and has said it doesn’t financially support Israel in any way. But in October 2023, the company criticized and sued a union aiming to organize Starbucks workers after the union posted pro-Palestinian comments on social media; Starbucks was subsequently included in consumer boycotts.

The coffee chain accounts for about 90% of Berjaya Food’s revenue. In March 2024, Berjaya’s owner spoke out in exasperation. He argued that boycotting Starbucks in Malaysia is unnecessary because it’s essentially a local operation. “We don’t even have one foreigner working in the head office or stores,” Vincent Tan said. “In the stores, 80% to 85% of employees are Muslim.”

Tan’s words hardly lessened the impact. Revenue for Berjaya’s Starbucks franchise declined to 676 million ringgit ($152.4 million) for its fiscal 2024, compared with 1 billion ringgit ($225.4 million) the year before. Berjaya Food blamed the decline on the negative impact of the ongoing conflict on consumer sentiment.

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Medhi from Publicis Indonesia says authenticity is “nonnegotiable” when it comes to catering to Muslim consumers. That creates openings on which companies like Wardah and Buttonscarves can capitalize.

Anggrea, the Buttonscarves CEO, describes her typical aspirational customer as a Muslim woman who now has more money and may want to buy a better-quality, more fashionable scarf to use as a hijab. Italian fashion house Loro Piana has been selling scarves in Southeast Asia for decades, Anggrea notes, but a middle-income person in a place like Indonesia may not be able to afford that level of luxury.

That is the market Anggrea positions her brand to operate in, and she sees a market not only in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia, but even as far as Turkey. Her goal is to create products that specifically speak to the Muslim consumer but are still accessible to the mainstream market. She argues that her brand is really a lifestyle apparel company, and not exclusively a hijab-making one.

A well-designed and good-quality scarf is versatile, she says. “Some non-Muslims wear scarves as an accessory; Muslims choose to wear it on their heads.” She adds that while Muslims make up the bulk of Buttonscarves customers, sales do go up during Christmas.

“Other societies can relate with this lifestyle,” Anggrea says, including modest fashion apparel that covers wearers to the wrist or ankles.

Sari Chairunnisa of Wardah strikes an even more ambitious tone. She explains that halal products, whether food or cosmetics, emphasize responsible resource use and a commitment to sustainability.

She recounts conversations she had about halal cosmetics at a beauty expo in September in Boston, noting that consumers were beginning to associate halal with sustainable production. “When they see a halal logo, even though they’re not Muslims, they ask if it’s a sustainable or a natural product, so they already have their own definition,” Sari says. “Fifteen years ago they might have asked, ‘What is this logo?’”

Sari thinks that with enough education—and with a growing Muslim consumer class buying up halal products—the concept of halal will gain global mainstream acceptance outside of Islamic communities.

“I believe halal will become like ikigai in Japan,” says Sari, referring to the Japanese term for a passion that provides value and joy in life. “It’s a Japanese concept, but foreigners can also buy into it.”

This article appears in the April/May issue of Fortune with the headline “The new Muslim consumer.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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