About
Alex Szabo
Twenty years building and running commercial operations across Asia and Europe. First country P&L in his mid-twenties, a group board seat two years later. A garage-startup e-commerce platform carried to a strategic exit. Regional revenue scaled across APAC for Google. A luxury vertical built from zero for Samsung. Buy-side PE due diligence on a major APAC acquisition.
Alex has worked both sides of the table: strategy mandates inside McKinsey, Google, and Samsung, and the hands-on building of regional offices, teams, and P&Ls at Nu Skin, Mall Group, and now TeakCharge. The career has run from Budapest to Seoul to Singapore: five years in Korea, Singapore as home today, with working chapters in London, the San Francisco Bay Area, Australia, and New Zealand. He has built businesses from zero and held senior operating mandates inside two of the world's most demanding corporate environments.
More on the approach: the commercial architecture methodology behind the work, and how an engagement actually runs.
Career arc
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2025 to present
TeakCharge, Singapore
TeakCharge is Alex's own practice. Work under the practice, all documented on the Cases page, includes:
- Commercial discovery and systems for a luxury hospitality group: CRM and inventory-system specification, vendor selection, and a validated board study on spinning the platform out as a standalone software business.
- Innovation discovery on AI rails for the non-core growth unit of a global consumer group: discovery and conviction across five AI platforms, with the operating method codified end to end into a handbook the client team runs.
- An AI-powered investment screening and M&A target evaluation engagement for a leading Asian firm, adopted as the client's standard for investment and acquisition decisions.
- Market entry and commercial architecture: a China-to-Europe expansion design for a leading energy-technology group, and a full commercial engine, institutional channel included, for a Southeast Asian longevity and hospitality group.
- The investment desk: scored fund due diligence and co-investment briefs for family-office capital, run through the same gates as client work.
Alongside client mandates, Alex is a next-generation mentor for APAC family businesses and has held a board seat at one of their businesses. The focus is deliberate and narrow: commercial strategy, AI-native go-to-market, and PE commercial due diligence for clients where APAC operating experience is the deciding factor.
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2022 to 2024
Stryber, Singapore
As Managing Director and Partner, Alex built and scaled the firm's APAC business and team out of Singapore, secured its revenue in the region, and established its private equity client work.
The private equity practice began as his own thesis: every commercial due diligence surfaces adjacent opportunities a fund could validate inside its own value-creation window, and nobody was selling that as a service. He built the offer, then won a leading APAC private equity fund as its anchor client and led the buy-side diligence that followed.
During his tenure the practice was appointed, through competitive tender, to Singapore EDB's Corporate Venture Launchpad.
Three EDB co-published research papers came out of this period, anchoring a formal record of Singapore and Southeast Asia operating knowledge.
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2020 to 2022
Google, Singapore
As Head of Strategy and Operations, Devices and Services APAC, Alex led the cross-divisional strategy execution that scaled the region's revenue across APAC markets, aligning country teams and functional leaders around a unified growth agenda and securing a significant uplift in the combined marketing and sales incentive fund. He also built the company's APAC consumer-subscription partnership architecture from the ground up, negotiating the OEM, telco, and carrier commercial frameworks that took the subscription portfolio into multiple APAC markets, including activating Taiwan from zero to live.
The seat had three jobs running at once: winning the region's investment envelope from headquarters and arbitrating its split between countries. Monitoring what the spend returned and moving what worked between markets. Running point with the sales organisation on market openings and process repairs. He also supported the marketing-process integration of a major acquisition, which is slower and more negotiated work than the deal announcement ever suggests.
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2015 to 2019
Samsung, Seoul
The first framing of the luxury Micro-LED vertical put it into B2B retail, where a total-cost read killed it on the spot. Alex moved it to luxury residential, assembled the partner set from audio through control systems, and opened the production-homebuilder channel in the US and then the UK, from zero, with no established playbook.
The seat was BD and Strategic Advisor to the B2B Division CEO. Alongside the vertical he conceived the company's first Hardware-as-a-Service commercial model, selected by the Global CFO and advanced to implementation, and ran strategic M&A pipeline scans across multiple technology verticals. He also spent four months in Europe as one of three people sent from the internal strategy group to implement a back-office consolidation, the only implementation that group ever ran. That is where the preference for owning delivery over handing over a recommendation hardened into a rule.
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2013 to 2014
McKinsey & Company, Budapest
After his INSEAD MBA in Singapore, Alex joined McKinsey as an Associate on large-scale transformation and market entry work, including project-leading a major transformation engagement and architecting a European market entry blueprint for global Tier 1 banks entering consumer and SME fintech. McKinsey's analytical rigour and structured problem-solving became the foundation for how he frames commercial challenges today.
On the transformation, a recovery programme for a global mining group, he led two of the engagement's eight workstreams as project lead, building the bottom-up plan and the implementation roadmap, then stayed on to manage delivery rather than hand the binder over. On the banking blueprint he brought the e-commerce lens and mapped the partnership surface a deposit product could actually be sold through. That programme was stopped when the evidence said the existing infrastructure could not carry the design, and he still rates the stop as the right call.
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2008 to 2012
Mall Group, Budapest
It started in a family house in Budapest, the garage as the warehouse and the first floor as the office. Two years later Alex held a board seat at the group holding company, and the platform went on to a 10x return via Naspers's acquisition (it later grew further in value under its next owner, Allegro Group). It was the first time he ran a P&L under direct investor scrutiny.
The seat itself was a Regional GM and Board Member role: building and scaling the commercial team and regional operations, a Warsaw posting overseeing the Polish business from the board, and responsibility for international procurement and cross-border trading, where he built the group's first cross-border sourcing engine: buying through the far larger Czech operation to widen the Hungarian range into new categories, and putting Hungarian suppliers onto the group's shelves in the other direction.
Two commercial plays from that period still shape how he works. He opened a showroom beside the new warehouse purely so tier-1 electronics vendors would grade the business as a retail partner and release store-tier pricing and training, while the operation stayed pure e-commerce. And he fired the agency model and took paid search in-house, then hired and trained the team behind it, at a point where the business was Google's single largest Eastern European advertising account.
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2005 to 2008
Nu Skin Enterprises, Budapest
Alex's first regional-office scale-up: promoted from Country GM to Regional General Manager, he scaled the Hungary office into one of this NYSE-listed direct-seller's fastest-growing regional HQs globally, within its first two years, building out the regional operations and team and leading new market entries across Slovakia, Romania, and Czech Republic, plus a six-month post-acquisition restructuring of the Poland business (2007). From that build:
- Designed a high-trust, non-hard-sell commercial culture across a large multilingual team.
- Built the compliance infrastructure for rapid cross-border expansion in a regulated industry.
The promotion came with the regional P&L, and the expansion ran on a deliberately lean market-entry model. Rather than stand up a full local entity before the first revenue, Romania was opened from Budapest: Romanian-speaking staff hired at the regional office, logistics rerouted, the banking and financial control held centrally, and infrastructure added only once the market earned it. That cut the time to open a market from years to months. He re-architected regional fulfilment onto a single Eastern European warehouse carrying localised product for the whole cluster, and hired the functional leadership layer, marketing, finance and the customer centre, that a regional headquarters actually needs.
Alex is an early stage investor across public and private markets, and works hands-on with his portfolio companies on commercial strategy.
Beyond the practice
Publications
- APAC Signal (apacsignal.substack.com), a daily editorial from Singapore on APAC markets, technology, and capital.
- Three EDB co-published research papers: Venture Engine 101, Commercializing IP, and the SE Asia Venturing Report, hosted by EDB.
- TeakCharge Insights: published articles on APAC commercial strategy, industrial policy, AI adoption, and innovation. See the Insights page.
Personal
Outside client work: coffee, fitness, and longevity. A decade before the category went mainstream, Alex built and ran a boutique wellness facility centred on EMS training and recovery therapies. He is also a licensed private pilot and a licensed skydiver.
He has lived in Asia since 2012 and in Singapore since 2019, after five years based in Seoul. Budapest to Seoul to Singapore: three markets that demand completely different commercial instincts, and still the most useful line on the CV.