Why Malaysia is looking to supercharge its ICT sector

um i say i wanted to talk to you about digital malaysia how important is it for incentives like these to be going on in malaysia right now okay absolutely important uh we've set a goal to actually increase ict contribution to our gdp from 12 uh in 2012 to 17 so what does it take for a country to move that number up you have to do it through a big framework with incentives for private sectors to come in as well yes so what are those incentives what what what can people expect and what do you want from the companies that you're going to be working with well you know i won't go into the large foreign investment portion but what we want as well is a healthy ecosystem for developmental activities both from our citizens as well as others who could develop applications not only for commercial uh benefit which is good obviously but there are also social benefits that we want as well now part of that contribution is to get malaysians and and the developer community to start

thinking about not only consuming but developing components so from basic understanding of how to develop apps to how to commercial apps how to partner obviously and then go and take it the component we've we have already over the last two years uh trained uh about 700 malaysians in just developing mobile apps for example we want that to grow to about 10x so that would be about a core community about seven seven eight thousand malaysians who will then also influence another 10x in you know casual development capabilities yeah so we're not talking about millions obviously but the reason we want to enable that that includes both malaysians and non-malaysians is so that they can start thinking about either commercial apps social apps you know social good apps uh government apps etc so that malaysia itself then transformed from just consuming it to a country that actually produces yeah both for them consumption as well for export obviously so do you want do you want the people that come

out of schemes like this to be thinking about creating content for malaysia or have you got a more global look you know the the genre that we are asking them to do is in enterprise in games in entertainment in learning that can apply for malaysia as well as outside of malaysia so obviously from a commercial standpoint you want to make sure that it's commercially viable for you know your markets right so that includes international as well but you know there are some as they develop internationally flavored apps there will be those that benefit malaysia as well so we don't confine it to malaysia only for example so um from the outside looking in um are you uh interested in speaking with developers and publishers bringing them in and using sort of learning from them and using their talent to to inform the talent that you already have yeah or is it simply an investment uh sort of angle that you're going for uh so once again you know uh we have an investment inbound investment uh strategy as well

um so i won't touch on that component but you're right you know partners in the ecosystem you met some of them uh this morning as well is key to malaysia so they are asking the same question what do we get in terms of collaboration if we come in as well right both want to enhance the ecosystem so i think they are uh comforted that you know there is a government initiative that specifically focus on helping to develop that developer ecosystem it's not just about an investment component because you know both sides want to have that win-win scenario as well so we welcome the nokias we welcome the googles we welcome you know um the ibm's uh we welcome the other parts of the ecosystem who's not only going to teach us but also bring us to market at the same time our role is to excite and centis and filter those who are in casual development as well as in serious development as well yeah so that it's a funnel into those kinds of partners who want that kind of capabilities coming up from the collaboration um

asia has a fantastic history of gaming specifically um you know japan when taito kicking everything off with space invaders all the way up to um the the mobas of today with china and so forth and first of all i suppose i would want to ask do you know do you feel like malaysia can compete with china japan korea i don't see it as competing i see it as a value-add activity that's necessary in building this ecosystem whether it's serious games or casual games as well when games are concerned yes there are partnerships partners who are in the games industry who want that output from a serious development perspective and that's great we have a program for that we also want people to actually understand game techniques and development so that it can apply to multimedia learning for agriculture which is a games based component as well we also have an animation stream obviously where arts is important in the games and vice versa

and also helps societal uh apps so as you can see we don't we don't as a government we don't just box those components in only but see where we can leverage those activities of development across other uh development capabilities that we want and uh and just a quick final question obviously uh i'm i'm from britain and pog gamer are uk based and one of the one of the sort of hot topics uh that keeps getting thrown around is that um the british government isn't particularly interested in helping to fund and support the games industry where do you feel this where do you feel this this this want for the government to help it's its people develop you know in ict skills where do you feel this this emanates from is it a cultural influence is there is there something in malaysian culture that makes you want to um sort of advance in technology or is there a or is it a sort of economic factor

um i think you know from a malaysian perspective we've always had waves of evolution in a short period of time 50 years plus of independence and we've ever gone through three iterations of our economy uh and so this is the third one in digital so i think it's a natural evolution in terms of looking you know looking beyond the mountain so to speak now we all know about the digitization on the consumer level and obviously behavior changes as well i mean a smaller country like malaysia goes through a different learning curve than those who are used to technology we jump straight from you know grandfathers not learning how to use any technology to say i can't live without it because that's how i communicate and that has permitted in you know in a greater sense in our cultural society so rather than just let consumerism apply we want our people to actually take advantage of it in developing those components again that's why i said social good social applications yes they are components of

commercialization and serious business as well so it's to us it's a natural evolution about now malaysians taking charge but hey there are components that we can take advantage that we couldn't do but the decision uh the country environment at least in malaysia i can speak for malaysia it's always the heavy hand of government is always there in helping direct those components now i think what's a bit different in our instant is the military government realized when it comes to this new age technology they couldn't do it themselves but what i think they did very well is create this agency with private sector people like us are running their agency so all my staff are not from the government we're from the outside actually working on behalf of the country to develop this ecosystem that gives you a better perspective absolutely and you know that means that whatever we think works we learn from other countries whether it's uk or jordan et cetera and then say this these are policies or frameworks that will apply in a malaysian environment and it's a lot easier for governments to accept it because you know we spend both

sides of the equation we understand what it needs to be done in private sector but we speak government speak as well