Once seen as a US export, employee equity is forcing Asia HR to rethink how to compete for talent
The image surrounding employee share plans in Asia is decidedly California tech bro. Think genius college dropout rolling up to a gleaming corporate campus for a job interview, grabbling handfuls of company merch while munching on free buffalo wings as he aces the coding test.
But the reality is different. Global employment platform Deel has unique insight into how prevalent employee share plans have become through the equity grants it processes and administers for employees on its own payroll and employer-of-record platform. A wave of equity in employees’ back pockets is now starting to spread to Asia.
More than 8,000 employees across nearly 100 countries have received equity through Deel over the past four years, and about 30% of them work at AI companies, according to Deel's new equity compensation report.
While most compensation data come from surveys, where companies self-report what they pay, Deel’s global scale gives it a line of sight into equity trends that would otherwise be difficult to piece together from public disclosures alone.
For HR and total rewards leaders across Singapore, Hong Kong, India and Southeast Asia, equity plans are no longer something head office in the United States decides. It is something they now have to design, benchmark and explain to candidates on the ground.
Equity moves beyond engineering
The first thing Deel data shows is that equity plans no longer belong just to engineering roles.
Sales roles moved from 18% to 27% of employer-of-record equity grants processed through Deel since 2023, according to the report, narrowing what had been a wide gap between equity-favoured functions and everyone else. If a company's sales compensation plan is still built entirely on cash, it is competing for candidates against offers that increasingly are not.
This changes how APAC employers structure roles that sit outside the traditional tech track. A regional sales lead being recruited into a US-headquartered company may now expect a mix of salary and equity as standard, not as an unusual perk reserved for a handful of senior hires. Total rewards teams that have built sales comp around cash-only structures may find themselves explaining, rather than assuming, why their offer looks different.
APAC catches up
The shift isn't confined to which roles get equity. It's also showing up in where those grants are going.
APAC's share of new-hire equity grants has more than doubled since 2022, according to the report, and North America is no longer the outlier in equity distribution that it once was. The report also notes that the US still leads on the scale of individual equity packages, granting equity to 44% of its workforce compared with Germany, the UK, France and the Netherlands, and that US-headquartered companies remain over-represented among Deel's equity clients relative to its customer base overall. But the direction of travel in APAC is clear enough: US and global companies hiring locally are granting equity on the same terms they would use at home, and that resets what candidates expect from employers based in the region too.
For an HR leader in Ho Chi Minh City or Bengaluru, that means equity questions are no longer confined to the occasional US secondment. They turn up in ordinary hiring conversations for roles that, three years ago, would never have included a share plan.
What this changes in an APAC offer
The report is explicit that equity treatment varies sharply by jurisdiction across APAC, so specific tax and legal positions sit with local counsel rather than with HR alone. What HR and total rewards leaders can start working through now are the design questions sitting underneath that complexity.
How do you explain the value of equity to a candidate in a market where deferred, illiquid compensation is unfamiliar, and cash has always been the trusted measure of a job's worth? How do you handle grant administration when the same role might be filled in three or four different countries, each with its own vesting norms, disclosure requirements and tax treatment? And what is the answer when a candidate places a cash-heavy local offer next to an equity-heavy one from a US competitor hiring into the same market?
None of these questions has a single correct answer, and equity should not be treated as a way to lock in a hire long-term regardless of how the role or the market evolves. But they are now live design questions rather than hypothetical ones, and employers who have not worked through them will be doing so live, in front of a candidate, rather than ahead of time.
A wider spread of ownership
Step back from the mechanics and there is a broader shift at play. As American companies hire and grant equity abroad, the wealth created by that ownership is no longer concentrated in a handful of US postcodes. It is distributed, in smaller and more varied amounts, across the workforces that companies are building in Asia, and increasingly reaches functions well outside engineering.
For HR leaders in the region, that is not simply a US trend to monitor from a distance. It is a shift in how compensation works in markets they hire in every day, and one they are now expected to have a position on.
The stereotype of equity plans for genius college dropout hires in Silicon Valley is outdated. These days, employees being offered equity as part of employment packages are just as likely to be sitting in talent hubs like Mumbai, Singapore or Ho Chi Minh City.
Read Deel's equity compensation report here to explore the complete findings and guidance for structuring equity offers across APAC markets.
This article was produced in partnership with Deel
