Malaysia is counting on its well-established ecosystem and talent pool in the electrical and electronics space to win investments amid competition from peers in South-East Asia, according to International Trade and Industry Minister Tengku Datuk Seri Zafrul Abdul Aziz.
He was making a case for building on strengths that make the country stand out to investors, rather than relying only on incentives to attract businesses as he said financial giveaways can easily be matched by others.
Tengku Zafrul’s comments at an investor conference in Kuala Lumpur on March 8 follow Malaysia’s recent success in attracting top brands such as Tesla Inc and Amazon Web Services. While Tesla plans to import its EVs into the South-East Asian nation and build a network of superchargers, AWS will invest RM25.5bil (US$6bil) in cloud-computing infrastructure by 2037.
Tesla chose Malaysia as the country has a proven ecosystem to support the company, built over the past 50 years, Tengku Zafrul said. Few know that companies in this space already provide services of more than RM200mil to Tesla, he added.
Tengku Zafrul said Tesla will be working very closely with small- and medium-sized enterprises locally as it goes about building its supercharger network.
The minister had previously said that the planned investments are expected to create high-quality job opportunities and further lift Malaysia’s outlook. – Bloomberg
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