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> Mandarin is the preferred language as they're all owned by the SEA Chinese diaspora

Wouldn't the SEA Chinese diaspora be more likely to speak Hokkien? Or maybe Cantonese?

No, there are so many dialects (Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, Hokchew, Hakka, Hainanese, ...) that are so unevenly distributed that Mandarin is the lingua franca. Eg. Singapore was mostly Hokkien back in the day, but decades of government policy has taught Mandarin to basically all Chinese there and younger folks know dialect poorly if at all.

They speak many different languages at home, but they all do business in Mandarin.

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