Selling Malaysia as outsourcing hub

By Sharen Kaur

MALAYSIA needs to improve the country's branding and publicity and leverage on certain key strengths to tap the growing potential of the shared services and outsourcing (SSO) industry worldwide.

Industry experts say that Malaysia benefits from good infrastructure, multi-lingual skills, political stability, skilled workforce and comparable cost advantage, which make it an increasingly favourable offshore locations.
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They said the value of the outsourcing market in Malaysia is currently about US$2.5 billion (RM8.7 billion) but can exceed US$10 billion (RM34.9 billion) in the next three years to five years with more emphasis placed to boost the industry. The global SSO industry is valued at more than US$750 billion (RM2.6 trillion).
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The marketplace is dominated by key players, notably Teledirect, Scicom, SRG, VPI, VADS Bhd, TeleTech Holdings Inc and Vsource Bhd.
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Malaysia, nominated by Atos Origin, won the "Offshore Destination of the Year" category of the UK National Outsourcing Association (NOA) Awards last year.

Hmm... At present, Malaysia's share of global SSO revenue pie is only at 0.3%, "...despite Malaysia being positioned as a global centre, the perception of the country overseas was not as expected." Something is critically FLAWED here!

Another concern.. the lack of English-speaking community in Malaysia...

Really? I attended a blogger's meet recently, and practically, all of the 100 or so people who attended speak English 95+% of the time instead of Mandarin, Hokkien etc. Most of them including the 1000s of bloggers throughout Malaysia also write mostly in English.

MDeC is coming out with specific plans to retrain the workforce but the message is not clear. We realise the importance of using the industry as an engine to speed up the academia programmes," Zulfiqar said.

No wonder! These people at the government agencies speak English that is out of this world! Were these bombastic sentences actually spoken by a human, or read off some white papers?

"Some 10 years from now, a new generation of Chinese would be able to speak very good English and the gap is going to get wider. Simply by converting Mathematics and Science in English is not enough. The foundation has to be built at the primary level," he (Zulfiqar) noted.

Now Zulfiqar, I hope you didn't mean that we should ditch Bahasa Malaysia completely, and adopt English instead as our national language?

Ariyanayakam pointed out that since Malaysia can't go back in time to change the education system, it should turn back and re-train the misalignment and workforce to get the people to the right level.

"The Government is trying and there are so many agendas in play. For whatever they are doing right now, they see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's a very structural thing and will take a while," he said.

The big guys are blaming the local labour here when the root of the problem, I'd say is those at the top -- the MDeC and these clueless corporations. I think they've been in trial-n-error mode too long. They need to stop "trying" and start doing something truly productive instead of bit*hing around too much. They are the ones hurting the industry, and Malaysia's slow growth in IT infrastructure and socio-economy.

Instead of talking too much, I think MDeC and these GLCs need to start listening to the people. Focus more on the 80%, not the 1%, or the middle 19%. Think really hard about what ICT means for global outsourcing. Do you think that those biggies of IT in USA, China and India started from being huge from Month/Year One? Or were they products of acquisitions and mergers of the micro businesses and later SMEs?

Read the full article at Business Times (Malaysia)