Digitalization and Regionalism: Challenges faced by SMEs in Malaysia

Dato' Dr. Rajah Rasiah is Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Asia Europe Institute, Universiti Malaya. He obtained his doctorate in Economics from Cambridge University in 1992 and was a Rajawali fellow at Harvard University in 2014. Among his external positions include: Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT, the Technology Management and Development Centre at Oxford University, the Centre for Rising Powers, Cambridge University, and UNITEN. He was also one of the principal authors of UNIDO’s 2009 flagship report, and one of the editors of the 2015 UNESCO Science Report. He is the 2014 recipient of the Celso Furtado prize from the World Academy of Sciences for advancing the frontiers of social science thought. In light of his scholastic contributions, Malaysia's Ministry of Higher Education conferred him the award of Distinguished Professor in Economics in 2017. He was awarded the Merdeka Prize for academic excellence in 2018, and conferred the title, Dato’ Paduka Mahkota Perak in 2019.

Datuk Michael Kang Hua Keong is the National President of the SME Association of Malaysia since 2015. He is also the director of SMB Solutions Management Sdn Bhd and SMB Connection Sdn Bhd, a couple of companies involved in ICT businesses and Consultancy services since 1992. He launched the SME community services since he joined SME Association in 1998. With an approximate 20 years of experience in the SME Community and a keen promoter of Malaysia’s SME sector, Kang has worked tirelessly to develop the SME landscape and encourage business owners to transform their business to keep up with global markets. He was a member of the Oversight Committee for Excise Duty under the Ministry of Finance, where he served to bridge the communication between SMEs and the authorities.

Francis Wong is currently the principal consultant in Abbana Consulting, which offering digital transformation consultancy and training services to enterprises. Prior to this, he was the deputy director of Huawei Enterprise Global Sales Team in Shenzhen, China until 2019. Among the focus areas ranging from enterprise business innovation and transformation, industry automation and intelligent, smart city, smart grid involving digital technologies of AI, big data analytic, cloud, IoT and 5G. Altogether, Francis has nearly 30 years of enterprise digital transformation experience in various industries with his footprints covered APAC, Middle-East, Africa and South-Asia. Some of the innovation projects spearheaded included smart agriculture in Australia, smart education in Indonesia, smart city in Singapore, industrial automation in Malaysia. He also contributes to the digital development in Africa countries, bringing light to the “Dark Continent” using IoT technology.

Jacob Lee Chor Kok has been in the field of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) industry and architectural sunshades for over 30 years. He is the Founder of ASLI Mechanical Sdn Bhd, recognised as one of Malaysia's leading manufacturers of flexible air duct, ceiling diffusers, supply air grilles, and jet diffusers, among many others. Since 2016, he has held the position as the Chairman FMM Industry 4.0 Working Committee for the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers - Malaysia's premier economic organisation responsible for leading Malaysian manufacturers in spearheading the nation's growth and modernisation.

KT brings over 20 years’ experience in Telecom Industry, focusing on business solutions development and strategic collaboration with government and enterprise. He started his career journey as Solution Architect, led different digital transformation projects of different industries and pioneering the strategic collaboration. He is now leading the Huawei Cloud business in Malaysia, to develop an effective action plans and strategy focus on enterprise digital transformation and ecosystem building to meet the ever-changing strategic business needs and client business requirements. He enables the “SMEs sell SMEs” strategy, 5G+Cloud+AI Smart City Incubation program and activate transformation journey with the local partner ecosystem to the road of Digital Malaysia. His other contributions on digital industry transformation includes Philippines government on national broadband plan, Malaysia government on Digitalizing SME strategy plan and supporting Indonesia government on Digital Indonesia paper. He is also one of the appointed member for Sarawak Digital Economy COE core members.

Fumitaka Furuoka is a Japanese economist. He is currently an Associate Professor at Asia–Europe Institute (AEI), University of Malaya. Prior to this, he was an Associate Professor at the School of Business and Economics, Universiti Malaysia Sabah and a Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. Before joining academia, from 1991 to 1999, Fumitaka Furuoka held the post of Senior Assistant at the Consulate-General of Japan, Penang. His main research interests include economic aspects of global warming and global health as well as hysteresis in unemployment, peace economics, energy economics, population economics and the application of statistical methods in linguistics.