KUALA LUMPUR: Datin Paduka Sarena Cheah, executive deputy chairman of Sunway Group, has been named to Forbes Asia’s 2025 Power Businesswomen list, which recognises 20 influential female leaders reshaping the region’s business and economic landscape.
Forbes Asia said this year’s Asia’s Power Businesswomen list highlights 20 accomplished leaders who are at the forefront of the region’s fast-evolving business and economic landscape.
“The women on this year’s Forbes Asia’s Power Businesswomen list are not just adapting to change, but actively shaping the future of the region’s business landscape,” Forbes Asia editorial director Rana Wehbe Watson said in a statement.
Among those is Cheah, who was appointed executive deputy chairman of Sunway Group in January, marking a new chapter in her three-decade career with the real estate-to-healthcare conglomerate founded by her father, Tan Sri Jeffrey Cheah.
Over the years, she has risen from a junior executive who helped out with photocopying to now piloting overseas expansion at the US$8.6bil market-cap company.
Cheah said that her father, the group’s executive chairman who started Sunway 50 years ago, “could not have imagined what it would become.” Now her focus is to “craft a strong plan for the next 50.”
Also featured on the list are Kuok Hui Kwong, chairman, CEO, and executive director of Shangri-La Asia; Jamie Khoo, CEO of DayOne Data Centres, from Singapore; Lani Darmawan, president director and CEO of Bank CIMB Niaga, as well as country head for Indonesia at CIMB Group
; and Amanda Lacaze, managing director and CEO of Lynas Rare Earths from Australia.
Kuok, who took the reins in August as CEO of Shangri-La Asia, the hotel group that her father, business legend and Malaysia’s wealthiest person, Robert Kuok, founded in 1971, has already made significant moves.
Following the May launch of a Shangri-La Signatures Hotel in Hangzhou, she opened two new hotels with a combined 600 rooms at Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai in October, with a third in Kunming slated to welcome guests early next year.
The group is also expanding its footprint through managed properties, which now make up nearly a quarter of the over 100 hotels in its portfolio.
In a different sector, Khoo is driving rapid growth in data infrastructure. Khoo is on track to finish two projects by the end of the year while breaking ground on three more.
Today, DayOne operates 14 data centres with a combined capacity of 350 megawatts (MW). The company has signed deals to build more than 25 data centres across Indonesia, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, to bring its total capacity to more than 800MW by early 2027.
The company has so far raised US$1.9bil over two funding rounds, in addition to nearly US$4bil in loans, to bankroll the expansion
Meanwhile, in the banking sector, Lani has led Bank CIMB Niaga to record performance. Since taking charge four years ago, Lani has steered Bank CIMB Niaga, Indonesia’s seventh-largest bank, toward record growth.
The Jakarta-based subsidiary of Malaysia’s CIMB posted a net profit of 6.8 trillion rupiah in 2024, its fourth consecutive year of record earnings, on net interest income of 13.3 trillion rupiah.
In the mining and resources sector, Lacaze has driven transformation at Lynas Rare Earths. Over the past decade, she has turned the company from a loss-making miner into a global leader. As the company’s first woman CEO, she is now seizing one of its biggest opportunities yet: filling a China-sized gap in the rare earth industry.
Backed by billionaire Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person, Lynas is the world’s second-largest producer of rare earths and the only major producer outside China.
