KUALA LUMPUR (Bernama) – To help boost Malaysia’s economic growth and income, more focussed and targeted promotional efforts are needed to attract quality foreign direct investments (FDIs) from small and medium enterprises (SMEs) of new emerging sectors as well as high-technology and skills-intensive industries.
In the wake of falling government revenues from crude oil and oil-related exports following the plunge in global crude oil prices, there is now an urgent need to expand and diversify income from commodity-based resources to new areas of growth.
There is much scope to expand income and attract investments in new emerging sectors such as advanced electronics and technology sectors as well as halal and services industry which can generate further FDI inflows into Malaysia, create jobs and spark multiplier impact on the economy as well as income growth.
By capitalising on Malaysia’s competitiveness and its strategic position in Asean within the Asean Economic Community as well as its longstanding strong ties with major investors from Japan and South Korea, Malaysia can further attract large-scale investments.
Having attracted a lot of investments in the manufacturing sector from the US, Europe, Japan and South Korea, it can further exploit immense potentials for foreign corporations to set up their regional offices here through the principal hub incentives.
The government introduced them in Budget 2015 in the form of tiered rate of tax reductions based on the amount of value created in establishing regional operations in Malaysia.
Foreign-owned entities which set up principal hubs in Malaysia must be locally-incorporated and there will be no local equity or ownership imposed on them.
Japan External Trade Organisation (JETRO) Kuala Lumpur Managing Director, Akira Kajita, said Japanese companies in Malaysia had been expanding in Islamic financial services through the setting up of operations hub here.
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