Sumana Rajarethnam is the South-east Asia director of the Economist Corporate Network based in Singapore. Sumana works closely with network members to help inform their business strategies through political, economic and operational insight and to connect them with their senior leadership peers. 

Sumana is a senior policy professional with 20 years of business advisory experience. He has most recently been working in the Chinese technology sector, including stints at Kuaishou Technology and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. He is the co-founder of 

MyBasket.sg, a platform that allows users to calculate their personal inflation. 

Before joining The Economist Group, Sumana worked as a journalist and in public relations with a focus on government and institutional clients. He served as executive director of the Asian Dialogue Society, working to develop an alternative ASEAN Charter with leading policymakers, and organised the “Building a Better Asia” series, a programme for young leaders across Asia undertaken with Peking University and the Nippon Foundation. 

He was close to quitting the policy world to sell coconut milk, but that plan fell victim to a global pandemic. He’s ridden a bicycle through every state in Malaysia and driven a rickshaw from Tamil Nadu to Meghalaya, but is constantly reminded by weak knees that adventures like that were 20 kilogrammes ago. 

Sumana holds a BA in political science from UCLA and a Master’s degree in public policy from the University of Michigan.