From The Desk of The Executive Director

From The Desk of The Executive Director

Now that the election fever is over, it’s time to get down to business. For the first time in Malaysian history, after 61 years in power, the country bore witness to a peaceful transfer of power with Barisan Nasional becoming the opposition party making way for Pakatan Harapan. Exciting times albeit uncertain times but AMCHAM stands ready to support our members in the transition. We will continue to represent our members’ views in a spirit of mutual prosperity and will look to receiving input from our member companies.

To better understand this remarkable event, AMCHAM has been holding some Post Election Briefings which you can read about below. We will continue to do so as long as we can secure speakers amidst their very busy schedules.  Please do suggest anyone you think would be interesting to your peers.

Over the next few weeks we will be actively reaching out to you for feedback about the impact or concerns of your business, your participation will help us  identify areas that we can highlight to the incoming Ministers and their staff (please direct submissions to [email protected])

At the end of May, AMCHAM was honored to be invited to meet with the Council of Eminent Persons.  AMCHAM Vice-President, Steve Clayton (CEO of JP Morgan) and I provided a short briefing to the Council and highlighted some of the overarching concerns the Chamber has been addressing in addition to specific issues that still need some attention. We also reiterated our mutual interest in ensuring Malaysia remains a favored destination for U.S. investments and the desire to have greater transparency and more opportunities for substantive collaboration.

Things are moving fast, every day we are seeing change being put into motion, but as we all know change, while welcome is also fraught with challenges.  We will continue to monitor as best we can but we do ask you to highlight issues or areas of concern as they emerge in your respective industries.

GST, which we worked on for over two years has now been zero-rated and sales and service tax (SST) will be reintroduced on 1 September. Businesses across all sectors will be impacted and companies will have to prepare for the transition.  As we wait for details to emerge we would like to hear back from you about your immediate and longer term concerns. Please email us at [email protected]

The Government is also in the process of reviewing mega infrastructure projects, their decisions will also have impact on some of our member companies.  

AMCHAM is your voice and platform; we look forward to the active participation of all our members to  find constructive ways to work alongside the new Government to ensure a healthy and stable business environment. We can only do this effectively if we can understand what issues to raise with the respective ministries.  This requires learning from our members what you are facing at your companies. I urge you to reachout to AMCHAM and work with us to ensure we can hold constructive dialogues with the newly empowered officials. To get involved please contact Lewis ([email protected]) or Kevin ([email protected]) to find out more.