Malaysia’s digital economy: streamlined and gearing up?
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
The last slot of Day 1 of Malaysia’s MyFintech Week 2022, featured a panel discussion about the country’s digital economy moderated by Smita Kuriakose, a senior economist at The World Bank.
The first question she had was directed towards PwC partner, Marina Che Mokhtar, to ask Marina’s opinion about the local digital economy compared to others in Southeast Asia.
Marina responded, there are many lenses out there which try to measure the digital economy. Unless there is an agreed standard way to do so, how does one begin to?
“I think the more important question is what are the kind of opportunities (that exist) when we look at SEA.”
In the development of more unicorns, regulation has to be relooked so that they facilitate instead of impede innovation.
With e-commerce, online media, and financial services growing, definitely the digital payment sector, the banking sector and of course, the innovative services within the space are ripe opportunities to explore, she opined.
Marina sees Malaysia’s strength being in high-tech export, “…but of course there are other areas to focus on which is in the spirit of the what the Malaysia MyDigital blueprint is.”
She shared a report she’d read about e-commerce income rising by 70-percent and how this reflects Malaysia’s capability to contribute to the sector – in terms of government commitment, various plans being implemented to address infrastructure, reskilling society, and encouraging SMEs and startups to participate.
MyDigital blueprint: An evolution over the years
On the status of the MyDigital Plan, CEO of MyDigital Corp., Fabian Bigar shared that out of 58 projects, three have been completed last year with 55 still on-going. He described the blueprint as being at the tail-end of Phase 1.
“Our quest to become a digital nation started way back in 1996 with the launch of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC). Over the years, various agencies from different ministries, came up with various policies and various plans and various blueprints, and to sort of govern them there are a few working committees.
On the status of the MyDigital Plan, CEO of MyDigital Corp., Fabian Bigar shared that out of 58 projects, three have been completed last year with 55 still on-going.
And of course over time, it became a bit more complex to manage. The problem of silos is very, very real.
Fabian opined that the current blueprint is an economic transformation plan in the digital era. It came about he observed, because in 2020 the government decided to take stock of the various initiatives, revisit them, streamline them, and update and subsume them under the umbrella of the digital economy.
Fabian pointed out that priority actions for this year include complete implementation of Phase 1.
He shared that the three key criteria include:
- Excellence in execution – making sure all data points are well consolidated and identified.
- Credibility and trust – the public acceptance has to be there
- Collaboration – more than what we have now to be able to move on to Phase 2 and Phase 3
Fabian opined that the current blueprint is an economic transformation plan in the digital era.
Gearing up for unicorns and FDIs
MDEC CEO, Mahadzir Aziz was also present as a panellist and he reinforced the vital role MDEC has played by sharing statistics like:
– There are more suppliers now than 25 years ago.
– Over 4,000 MSC-status companies making a more than 20-percent contribution to the economy
However, he also observed that neighbouring countries are leapfrogging Malaysia with better incentives and talent pools. Malaysia must ask itself what gaps there are to fill, to develop talents with better capabilities, discover the next achievers of excellence like Carsome and Aerodyne.
Malaysia must ask itself what gaps there are to fill, to develop talents with better capabilities, discover the next achievers of excellence like Carsome and Aerodyne.
In the development of more unicorns, regulation has to be relooked so that they facilitate instead of impede innovation. Not to mention, there has to be more purposeful funding that address scale-up stages of a company instead of only start-up.