I attended two of the syndication meetings for the NKEA ETP labs as well as the open day for the ETP last week. It was heartening indeed to see that the government has taken some concrete steps to stimulate the economy and ensure that Malaysia achieves a higher GNI by 2020. There are naturally queries that have to be answered - the level of details as most of the laboratory sessions that I attended in the open day did not seem to address HOW they planned to achieve those targets but really the sense was more that the ideas were there. The key thing to note is that the ideas came largely from the private sector players. It was disheartening to note the CEO of Pemandu state that this is private sector project and that if it failed, the blame would not lie with the government as it was a private sector driven project (I hope he meant it more as a joke.....) Some items that I feel must be in place before this will actually work :
1) The government has to be a key stakeholder in the ETP - in the formulation of policies and in most of all ensuring full transparency with tenders as well as project allocation (see below).
2) There seems to be a lack of effort with the ETP to involve foreign investment because the govt. is still hell bent on protecting local industry players. Let me highlight the fact that there seems to be mostly involvement from domestic private sector players and not foreign private sector players and yet one of the EPP for Greater KL is to attract the top 100 MNC to have their operations in Malaysia. How they plan to do that has not been outlined
The problem with this is that efforts such as the MRT which everyone agrees to be a good idea is long overdue (and why - because of protectionist policies to protect the local automative industry) whereas other countries in our region already have such infrastructure in place and better yet have attracted investment from foreign players to start up factories manufacturing automobiles eg. Thailand and Indonesia.
What can we as Malaysia do to compete with the other countries in the region who already have the infrastructure and policies in place? Really more thought has to go into that. It is easy to say that we want to attract 100 MNCs - but how will you convince us that it will be worthwhile to do so? That should be the main focus. I will definitely be purchasing the thick version of the ETP book on the 26th of October because I am presuming that there will be more details therein.
So my question is - is this enough and are we really making any fundamental changes - in the end the proof will be in the pudding ...
2) In the healthcare sector which is of interest to me - I am sad to say that the proposed plans will detract rather than invite foreign company investment in Malaysia. Why? Well suffice to say that protectionist efforts are in place again to protect the GLC generic companies in Malaysia. I was told that the CEO or some foreign pharmaceutical companies actually wrote a comment on the feedback form for one of the labs that attending the lab was a complete waste of time.
What the lab should have striven to do was to ask corporate players what it would take to have the companies invest in Malaysia, eg. manufacturing facilities, human capital requirements, tax breaks etc.
Instead, industry players are left to feel that the government is threatening rather than partnering with the MNC in this area.
I hope that this feedback will be taken seriously because ultimately in the long run, protectionist measures are not going to get the country anywhere.
Fine you can rely on local players but that's not what other smarter countries in the region are doing. Faham tak?
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