Whilst Malaysia's media publications, independent commentators, political analysts and politicians on both sides of the political divide have begun talking about the thorough trashing which the Pakatan Harapan/PPBM candidate received at the hands of the Barisan Nasional/MCA candidate in the Tanjung Piai by-election on Saturday 16th November, the critic of the socio-economo-futurist nonsense peddled by paperback writers, business and management consultants or CON-sultants and seminar speakers in me compels me to highlight Syed Akbar Ali's post on his OutSyed the Box blog early on Saturday before voting in the Tanjung Piai by-election began.
In his blog post, Syed Akbar Ali begins by criticising a statement by Tun Dr. Diam Zainuddin, former Finance Minister and former member of the now disbanded Council of Eminent Persons established after Pakatan Harapan won Malaysia's 14th General Elections on 9th May 2018, who attributed the current weakness of the Malaysian ringgit to the US dollar and other currencies to the eight million notices sent out by the Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia (LHDN) as having frightened the Malaysian public from spending, hence the ringgit weakened against other currencies. (The words in the Malay language in black).
However, Syed Akbar Ali, a former banker, disagrees with Diam and went on to attribute the ringgit's and other national currencies' strength to demand for it from importers overseas who want to buy Malaysia's goods, especially higher value-added goods, such as those from manufacturers in Malaysia.
Whilst that is a significant factor, I would also add confidence in the health of Malaysia's economy and political stability and future prospects for Malaysia's economic growth as well well as transient speculative buy and sell trading forces in currency markets.
Anyway, Syed Akbar Ali goes on to attribute the current 37% appreciation of the Thai Baht to the Malaysian Ringgit since 2014 to the fact that Malaysia used to export manufactured goods to Thailand and import commodities, especially rice and canned rambutans from Thailand but now Malaysia imports manufactured goods such as cars, tyres and so forth from Thailand.
Syed Akbar Ali also points out that with the 90% of Malaysian who earn less than RM3,000 per month not having to pay income tax, there is no need for them to fear spending which would attract the attention of the Inland Revenue Department. However, those who earn so little especially with today's high cost of living (which the Pakatan Harapan promised to reduce in their election promises but have not delivered since they became the government), such Malaysians have little to spend anyway, even if they want to, and that according to Malaysia's Minister of Education, 60% of Malaysia's university graduates are unemployed.
Syed Akbar Ali goes on to say that the solution is for Malaysia to move further up the value chain to manufacture and export very high-value manufactured products.
Now this leads me to the point of this post - i.e. that Malaysia began our Multimedia Super Corridor initiative back in 1997 or 22 years ago to develop a domestic Information and Communications Technology and multimedia (ICT) industry which would be an "engine of Malaysia economic growth" which would "propel Malaysia to become an knowledge-based, information-rich, high-income, developed economy by the Year 2020" but where is this "engine of growth" which would have required the employment of those unemployed of under-employed university graduates?
I have been writing about the ICT and multimedia industry, including Malaysia's and worldwide since September 1994 and covered the grand groundbreaking ceremony of Malaysia's "intelligent" city Cyberjaya and heart of Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor initiative in 1997 and since then, in their speeches senior government officials, government ministers, even the prime minister, as well as economic, business and management consultants as well as CON-sultants, tended to disparage Malaysia's earlier primary industries such a agriculture ("First Wave" industries), Malaysia's assembly and manufacturing industries ("Second Wave" industries), whilst proudly touting Malaysia's developing ICT and multimedia industries ("Third Wave" industries), as if they were ashamed of Malaysia's earlier industries which enabled our development.
Whilst, some Malaysian "Third Wave" industries have been spawned and nurtured by the Multimedia Super Corridor initiative, however until today, the Malaysia's ICT industry contributed a total of 18.5% to Malaysia's economy in 2019, according to the Department of Statistic Malaysia.
As for exports and imports of ICT products - i.e. goods, services, content & media in 2018, 90.4% of Malaysia's ICT products exported were ICT goods, whilst ICT goods comprised 88.7% of ICT products imported. The ICT goods mainly comprisedelectronic components & boards, communication equipment and consumer electronics
Exports ICT services comprised 7.3% of ICT products exports in 2018, ICT services comprised 9.1% of ICT products imported. Telecommunications services comprised the majority of ICT services exported and imported.
Multimedia content is a major aspect of the Multimedia Super Corridor initiative, where the the government agency charged with driving the Multimedia Super Corridor initiative - i.e. what was initially known as the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) and now renamed the Malaysian Digital Economy Corporation and in 2018, ICT content and media comprised a mere 2.3% of Malaysia's ICT products exported and 2.2% of ICT products imported.
Now, the production and export of ICT goods - i.e. an assembly or manufacturing ("Second Wave") industrial activity, has been going on in Malaysia since the early 1970s and most of it is done in assembly and manufacturing plants established in Malaysia by foreign multinationals to take advantage of our cheap labour or what was cheap labour back then. Heck! my first ever job was as a Process Engineer at the National Semiconductor integrated circuit assembly plant in the Senawang Industrial Estate just south of Seremban, Negeri Sembilan way back in March 1980.
The manufacture of ICT goods is not a primary focus of the MDeC and began in Malaysia long before MDeC or the Multimedia Super Corridor was mooted back in the 1990s. Also, telecommunications services which comprises the bulk of ICT services in Malaysia is not a major part of the Multimedia Super Corridor initiative either and telecommunications services in Malaysia (then Malaya) began in 1864 when the Department of Posts and Telegraph laid Malaya's first telecommunications line - i.e. atelegraph line connecting to the British Resident at Perak House in Kuala Kangsar to the house of Deputy British Resident in Perak at Taiping, about 103 years before the groundbreaking of Cyberjaya.
The next chart below shows employment by different sub-sectors of Malaysia's ICT industry.
Thankfully, there still is production of ICT goods (manufacturing and assembly) in Malaysia, since this ICT sub-sector employed 37% of the 1.12 million ICT employees in 2018, or else we would have plenty more unemployed Malaysians, including graduates.
ICT services (mostly telecommunications) employed 28.2% of ICT industry employees in 2018 and together, both ICT manufacturing and ICT services (mostly telecommunications) employed 66.2% or almost two-thirds of ICT employees in 2018 and these two are not "sexy", "Third Wave" industries.
Not quite sure what ICT trade is but I guess it includes all those Form 5 school leavers with or without an SPM selling PCs, PC accessories, mobile phones and so forth and ICT trade employed 20.9% of just over one-fifth of ICT industry employees in 2018.
And now we come to ICT content and media - intended to be Malaysia's "engine of economic growth" which altogether employed a mere 13.2% of ICT industry employees. I suppose most of them are web designers, graphic designers, video producers, animators and so forth - mostly vocational types of jobs, though some may have degrees in ICT, but a degree today means nothing, especially when toilet cleaners and gig-economy food deliverers, as well as roadside drink stall entrepreneurs have degrees, including engineering degrees, since they cannot find employment more suited to their qualifications.
Apparently, software and software systems development, robotics, artificial intelligence development - all "Third Wave" industry activities employ to few people to be statistically significant.
So what crap were government officials, government ministers, even the prime minister, ICT futurists, ICT consultants as well as CON-sultants, conference and seminar speakers talking about ICT and multimedia being Malaysia's "next engine of economic growth"?
Well, they are still talking the same crap even today, though the various western paperback writers who touted the "Information and Services Economy", "First, Second and Third Waves", "Bits and Bytes versus Atoms" and so forth have all dropped below the radar since the chronic financial crisis gripped the world since 2008 and which still mires the world, especially the capitalist world until today.
As real life shows, the sun sets where "sunset industries" leave, whilst the sun rises where "sunset industries" arrive.
And, today, countries which have lost their "sunset industries", especially the developed countries, are now scrambling to bring them back, hence the election of Donald Trump and the rise of the populist right especially in Western Europe, with some predicting that Marine Le Pen could well be France's next president.
Ah yes! Fibreisation of the whole nation is supposed to drive the Malaysian economy !!!!!
More likely a means for the Pakatan government and parties to deliver their political messages to rural, semi-rural and urban lower income voters, whom they have had a hard time reaching out to, hoping that these voters who have traditionally voted Barisan Nasional would vote Pakatan instead, once they get the alternative message, instead of having to rely on BN owned or pro-BN mainstream print newspapers for their news.
At a DAP fundrasing dinner in SS2 Petaling Jaya before GE14, Y.B. Puan Yeo Bee Yin, then Selangor State Assemblywoman for Damansara Utama (now Malaysia's Minister of Energy, Science, Technology, Environment and Climate Change) mentioned in her speech that those voters without broadband access were unreachable due to their lack of Internet access so they tended to vote for Barisan Nasional but would be inclined to switch their vote to Pakatan if they had Internet access.
However, what the good Minister seems to forget is that Internet access is a double-edged sword, which parties on both sides of the political divide can effectively use to deliver their message. Also, that in a free press environment, where different media present different political perspectives across the political spectrum, people will tend to gravitate towards those publications or commentators whose message most closely jives with their political views and prejudices.
When I was a student in the U.K. back in the 1970s, there were many print newspapers offering different perspectives spanning the political spectrum from left to right and people tended to gravitate to those papers closest to their political and personal beliefs, and it's the same today when we are spoilt for choice of access to domestic and international media. My first choice of newspaper back then was The Guardian and today, it is Russia Today and Sputnik over media, such as CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera and so forth, which I mostly access on the Internet.
I'm pretty sure that the voters in Tanjung Piai have access to the Internet, either on their PC or more likely on their smartphones, as well as access to social media services where both real news and fake news are forwarded extensively to them peer-to-peer, and this could well have been a factor as to why the Pakatan/PPBM lcandidate ost theTanjung Piai by-election so miserably.
With greater broadband fibre Internet access come GE15, it could be a contributing factor to Pakatan being wiped out nationwide, so you want to continue with fibreisation, Y.B. Gobind Singh Deo, Minister of Communications and Multimedia.
Politics aside, where you should focus your fibreisation efforts is to improve the quality of fixed-line telephone, fax and also broadband Internet access in areas on the outskirts of cities and towns.
At a regional ICT conference and seminar organised by the National ICT Industry Association of Malaysia (PIKOM) back in 2015, representatives of companies with facilities in industrial estates mentioned that fibre broadband Internet services such as Telekom Malaysia's Unifi, so had to rely on TM's Streamx ADSL broadband Internet.
An ADSL (Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line) broadband Internet service is carried over metal (copper or aluminium) wire pairs into the subscribers' homes and offices, where the wire-pair line is connected to a splitter which separates the high frequency signals which carry the Streamyx broadband Internet signals from the low-frequency voice telephony signals. However, speeds over ADSL are limited compared to fibre and are also dependent upon the quality of the wire pair, due to oxidation or the wire, corrosion, loose joints and connections and so forth, which introduce noise
More recently, I have been helping a neighbour who runs a small business with his business communications with his suppliers and customers, many of them which still use fax, which works over wire-pairs and how well fax works depends very much upon the quality and condition of the wire pair serving the subscriber and I have found the fax at a supplier in the Kundang Industrial Estate in Rawang to be slow, the fax at a customer's premises on Jalan Bukit Kemuning, 40460, Shah Alam is also slow and the connection often drops and I usually hear line noise when their fax answers the call, whilst a supplier in the Jalan Perdana, Taman Segar Perdana, 43200 area of Cheras told me that their fax line had was down and had not been fixed despite repeated reports to Telekom Malaysia and they later just gave up the fax line.
Now don't let anyone tell you that fax is "a dinosaur", "obsolete" or whatever, since many businesses with turnover in millions of ringgit, including exporters still use fax for their business communications, both domestically in Malaysia and overseas to countries still with a less developed Internet infrastructure.
Back in the late 1990s or early 2000s, I visited Telekom Malaysia's telegraphic switching centre in the Telekom building on Jalan Bukit Nanas and learned that despite fax having been available in Malaysia since the late 1980s, however mostly banks still required telegraphic services for messaging and fund transfers with banks in countries where the voice telephony infrastructure was less developed.
Telegraphic technology is more robust since it uses current loop technology to transmit the ones and noughts which represent the characters transmitted, whilst fax employs different tones carried over the line to represent elements of the image of the document or picture being transmitted, so is more susceptible to interference from line noise.
Legacy telecommunication networks had a cable containing a bundle of wire pairs running from the telephone exchange to a cabinet by the road (those cigar-tube or "rocket" shaped things) in the vicinity of the customer, where the wire-pair serving a subscriber is connected to a distribution-side wire-pair to the customer's premises by the Telekom technician. Such legacy telephone networks are more prone to poor quality of wire-pair, especially when old and this is an old technology. After I left National Semiconductor, I joined Kabelcom, a Jabatan Telekom cable laying contractor where I supervised teams of workers laying cables underground and overhead for Jabatan Telekom (this was before Telekom Malaysia was established), so I am familiar with this type of telecommunications network.
However, I understand that today, the telephone exchange is connected by fibre to a distribution cabinet by the roadside in the vicinity of the customers in that area and active electronic equipment in the cabinet (rectangular boxes) converts the light signals in the fibre to tones over wire-pairs which are then connected to the wire-pair serving the subscribers' home or office.
Whilst I do not know for sure and could be wrong but I believe that this is the configuration of the Telekom Malaysia telephone network serving my area of Petaling Jaya, especially since there is a fibre cabinet just next to a "cigar-tube" cabinet in the vicinity of his premises and any fax I send him from my Unifi phone line is delivered fast and received documents and images are clear.
Again, whilst I don't know for sure and could be wrong, I suspect that Telekom Malaysia's telephone network serving the industrial estates and commercial premises referred to above could be based upon wire-pairs all the way from the exchange to the customers' premises.
On the other hand, it could be due to loose or corroded wiring connections within the customer's premises and internal wiring is the cistomer's responsibility, more particularly, that of their wiring contractor or technician.
For instance, one day there was no dial tone to my neighbour's fax line and he called Telekom Malaysia who took a long time to come, so I checked Telekom Malaysia's the incoming wire pair (black colour) just before the junction box with the wire pair (grey colour) into his premises and heard a dial tone, so I went inside and found a dial tone on the wire pair (grey colour) connected to the telephone socket to which the RJ11 plug from his fax was connected and found that the screws which held the wires had been loosely tightened, so I reconnected the wires by wrapping them clockwise around the screw shaft and screwed the wires down tightly and there was a dial tone at the fax again.
We called Telekom Malaysia to cancel the service request and there has been no further problem with the fax line since then, well so far not.
Telekom Malaysia needs to train its telephone wiring contractors and the contractors' staff in seemingly ""simple" and "lowly" activities such as tightening a wire with a screw - i.e. that the wire must be wrapped around the shaft of the screw in the same direction as the screw is turned when it's tightened, which is most cases is clockwise. Wrap the wire around the screw counter-clockwise and tighten the screw clockwise is unprofessional and can result in a poor connection which could give problems later on.
Quite often, problems with seeming "humble", "mundane", low-tech aspects can bring down a highly sophisticated piece of equipment. For instance, planes have crashed with the death of all on board due to shoddy greasing of seemingly "humble" but critical mechanical components, such as a motorised jackscrew which controlled the stabiliser of an Alaska Airlines, McDonnel Douglass MD-83, Flight 261 which crashed into the sea off Los Angeles on January 31 2000, killing all persons on board.
The investigation by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board found the jackscrew to have been badly work and failed due to excessive wear due to inadequate and improper greasing by the maintenance mechanic and that Alaska Airlines had been trying to cut corners with maintenance.
Flying Inverted - Alaska Airlines Flight 261
That's neo-liberal, free market capitalism at its "best".
I'll now leave you with Syed Akbar Ali's OutSyed the Box post which follows below.
Saturday, November 16, 2019
*Ringgit jatuh antaranya disebabkan menteri PH 'bodoh' – Daim* ??
This is taken fully from here : http://kulihatlangitbiru.com/ringgit-jatuh-antaranya-disebabkan-menteri-ph-bodoh-daim
By admin on May 29, 2019 19
KUALA LUMPUR – Notis cukai pendapatan yang terlalu banyak dihantar kepada orang ramai membuatkan rakyat takut berbelanja hingga menyebabkan ringgit mengalami kejatuhan, kata bekas Pengerusi Majlis Penasihat Kerajaan Tun Daim Zainuddin.
Daim berkata perkara itu diburukkan lagi apabila penghantaran notis cukai itu diumumkan kepada orang ramai hingga menyebabkan mereka takut berbelanja.
"Income tax tak perlulah kacau orang. Kalau hantar notis mereka takut nak belanja, patut jangan kacau rakyat.
"Sebelum ini tidak pernah umum, bila Pakatan Harapan jadi kerajaan, hantar notis sampai lapan juta.
"Lapan juta notis kalau seorang isteri dan seorang suami sudah 16 juta, kacau ni. Anda bunuh keyakinan. Dulu mereka keluar makan, sekarang mereka takut nak keluar," katanya dalam satu wawancara eksklusif bersama Astro AWANI.
Beliau menasihatkan menteri-menteri Kabinet supaya berbincang terlebih dahulu dengan Setiausaha Akhbar masing-masing sebelum mengeluarkan kenyataan.
"Kalau nak buat kenyataan, bincang tengok apa kesannya, bincang dengan pegawai kemudian bincang menteri dengan menteri. Bukan seronok-seronok buat kenyataan.
"Kalau positif keluar kenyataan, kalau negatif jangan keluar kenyataan, kalau negatif nak umum juga, bodoh lah," katanya.
My comments : No Sir this is incorrect. Eight million notis cukai maybe excessive and stupid. But only people earning above RM3,000 need to worry about taxes. People earning below RM3000 per month (about 90% of the population) not only does not pay income taxes but they have no money to buy things.
The purchasing power in the economy has gone down. That is why people are not spending.
Whether people spend money or not may not have as much influence on the value of the Ringgit. I dont know where you got this idea.
The value of the Ringgit, as in any currency, is dependent on the demand for the Ringgit, especially from importers of Malaysian goods in other countries.
The more we can export, the higher the demand for our Ringgit and the higher the value of the Ringgit.
The less we export or less value added we export then the less demand for the Ringgit.
Even if we do not do anything the value of the Ringgit depends on what our trading partners are doing.
For example the Ringgit has fallen against the Thai baht. Why?
Dulu we export manufactured products to Thailand. Higher value added.
Thailand sold rice and canned rambutans to us. Less value added.
So our Ringgit was stronger.
Now we import manufactured products from Thailand - (Toyota, Ford pick up trucks), Continental, Michelin tyres etc. More value added.
We export less value added to Thailand.
So our Ringgit has fallen against the Thai Baht.
This has nothing to do with the Income Tax Department sending notis cukai.
If the people spend less on imported goods (Toyota trucks, Ford trucks, Continental tyres, Michelin tyres made in Thailand) it should help our Ringgit.
But even that is not happening.
We need very high value added, manufacturing and export industries.
Not toll roads.
But according to your third world class bodoh Minister of Education, 60% of your university graduates are unemployed. These are mostly Malay kids.
The solutions to the country's problems are simpler than a child digging a hole with a stick.
But it enriches everyone. In this country that seems to be the problem.
BTW. Better be quick to read Syed Akbar Ali's blog post above, since he tends to take down his posts a few days after he posts them.
Yours Trully
Politischeiss
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