Asia’s Dollar Exodus Accelerates: Corporations Dump USD for Local Currencies

Forget the ’strong dollar’ narrative—Asia’s biggest players are voting with their balance sheets. From Mumbai to Jakarta, boardrooms now demand contracts in rupees, baht, and yuan while treasury departments quietly offload greenback reserves.

The unspoken truth? Central banks won’t admit it, but this isn’t about monetary policy—it’s about survival. When even state-owned enterprises insist on local currency settlements, you know the dollar’s monopoly is cracking.

Bonus cynicism: Wall Street still claims this is a ’temporary adjustment.’ Meanwhile, CFOs across Asia are too busy counting their currency-swap savings to care.

De-Dollarization: Companies Want Local Currencies, US Dollar Getting Sidelined

Local currencies such as the Chinese yuan, Hong Kong dollar, Emirati dirham, and the euro are gaining momentum. In addition, a bank in Indonesia is setting up a desk to disburse loans in the Chinese yuan and not the US dollar. Another data shows that the vast majority of foreign-exchange trades that have been using the US dollar are shifting towards local currencies. De-dollarization gained wings in 2025, and local currencies are slowly yet steadily taking over the markets.

For example, when a UAE-based company wanted to settle payments to India, they used the US dollar and later converted it to the rupee. Now companies are finding a pact where local currencies can be directly transferred with no role for the US dollar. The greenback’s role of being an ‘in-between’ currency is getting skipped as de-dollarization grows massive across various sectors in Asia.

said Gene Ma, Head of China Research at the Institute of International Finance.There is no underlying loss for not using the US dollar anymore, as local currencies are strengthening in the charts.

The attempts to bypass the USD are getting easier, are governments are promoting the usage of local currencies through de-dollarization. It could only be a matter of time before this spreads, making local currency usage as normal as day.