BEIJING: Southeast Asian countries looking to capitalise on factories moving out of China due to the trade war could be disappointed: Any relocation is happening very slowly, and likely won’t accelerate rapidly in the near future.

That’s the takeaway from a study by Gene Ma, chief China economist at the Institute of International Finance. Southeast Asian countries are either too small to absorb the huge size of China’s processing and assembly trade, or they lack the technology and supply chains to handle more complicated production. Either way, the process of manufacturing moving from China to lower-cost nations is happening "very slowly, ” Ma said.