Malaysia needs to use tech, digitalisation and optimization to move away from that reliance on foreign manpower and automate more, according to ICAEW Fellow Chartered Accountant Rafizi Ramli, who served as former head of petrochemical planning and former finance head of international upstream operation at PETRONAS.
He said that for decades, Malaysia has benefited from cheap foreign labour and currently, two of the most impacted industries are retail and commodities. “Although retail is evolving quickly due to market demand, more traditional industries like commodities require a lot of innovation, for example, R&D into robotics and logistics. Hopefully what we’ve learnt during the pandemic will close market hurdles and we will see better adoption in the next one or two years.” Rafizi said.
Southeast Asia is facing a severe manpower crunch as a result of the pandemic. For decades, Malaysia has benefited from cheap foreign labour, and currently, two of the most impacted industries are retail and commodities,” he said this as a panellist at ICAEW Economic Insight Forum Q2 presentation
On the labour market conditions, he said that the ASEAN region missed out on the opportunity to promote digital awareness created by the pandemic and will subsequently lack an integral building block in digitisation, namely reskilling.
“I see a mismatch between how institutions and even the job market are dealing with reskilling. Although there is demand for tech related jobs in Malaysia, it is also getting increasingly difficult to get access to those talents and reskilling. For example, demand for software engineers is definitely on the rise.
However, at least in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, there is a shortage in supply. These three countries need to figure out how to balance this because in the case of Malaysia for example, supply cannot keep up with demand. A lot of investments which could have come to this region will be going to China or India if we don’t address this issue,” Razifi opined.
