Altair Engineering believes boosting digital adoption among Malaysian Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) requires the cooperation of multiple parties and the upcoming Budget 2023 has a key role to play in this.
MSMEs make up 97.4% of business establishments in Malaysia. MSMEs contributed 37.4 percent or RM518.1 billion to the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and recorded a total of 7.32 million employed persons or a share of 47.8% in 2021, according to the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM), clearly depicting MSMEs as the backbone of the Malaysian economy. However, MSMEs’ digital adoption, critical for economic sustainability, remains below par. Malaysia stood at 55% in the business sub-index for digital adoption, compared to neighbours, Singapore (86%), Brunei (66%), and Vietnam (59%), as reported by the World Bank’s Digital Adoption Index.
Understanding the challenges faced by MSMEs, Altair Managing Director for ASEAN and ANZ, Srirangam Srirangarajan, said, “Businesses, especially MSMEs have multiple priorities, having to juggle commitments to keep the business afloat and at the same time adopt technology to be competitive. Providing grants to deserving MSME players will go a long way as an investment towards advancing digitalization in Malaysia. Monetary support through grants helps lighten the financial burden, encouraging MSMEs to invest in automation and machine learning solutions into their operations to optimize cost, increase efficiency and improve return on investment (ROI) in the long term.”
On ensuring a sufficient supply of talent for the nation’s digital future, Altair highlights that the budget should include provisions to encourage the curation of opportunities to advance science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education and learning experience.
“It’s important to help our youth in schools and universities to start learning and embrace cutting-edge technologies used in the industry such as data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and simulation. At Altair, we have been actively working with universities to develop enriched industry-based curriculums with the goal of developing industry-compatible talent. In the pipeline, we are also looking at extending our efforts with schools. Early exposure to real-world industry tools and solutions will empower these future talents to step into the job market confidently and even navigate the curation of new jobs in the digital economy at the national and global level,” said Srirangam.
