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.

The JA Social Impact Program was designed to give a taste of entrepreneurship to students. This program is designed for secondary school to learn different aspects of business. This program, supported by Citi Foundation, has seen a traction from schools in 4 states in Malaysia namely Penang, Selangor, Kuala Lumpur and Negeri Sembilan.

Schools were handpicked by the State Education Office and with the help of Citi Volunteers, we managed to kick-start this program in 40 schools. We have also seen interest from teachers in this program as high school students are able to apply this business knowledge to their lessons in school. As a high school student, understanding the journey of an entrepreneur and the skills needed to start a business is essential.

The pillars of this program are based on the JA Be Entrepreneurial program which educates students to develop a comprehensive business plan among other business skills. We hope to conduct a successful competition in a few months, where we will compare business proposals from students and judge them based on their comprehensiveness and feasibility. Besides that, with this program we hope to inculcate entrepreneurship and business acumen among young adults in Malaysia.

Understanding that financial literacy is a skill that is vital to be instilled in young children, JA Worldwide, supported globally by HSBC has embarked on a journey to promote the JA More Than Money program.

The recently revamped JA More Than Money program has seen an increase in excitement among primary school students. In Malaysia, our goal was to reach more than 1,000 primary school students. With the support of the local HSBC volunteers, we have conducted this program in 7 schools around the Klang Valley impacting 936 students so far. Some of the schools selected were SK Sri Subang Jaya, SK Seafield, SJKT Ladang Kalumpang, SJKC Pun Hwa, SK Kampung Tunku, SK Convent Bukit Nanas (2) and SJKT Vivekananda.

JA More Than Money is designed to introduce students about money management, business and global trade. The newly improved program has a new look to it which appeals to students. The modified content also made it easier for volunteers to teach the various concepts to the students and hence young children find it easy to understand.

JA Malaysia hopes to continue this effort and promote the JA More Than Money to more students in Malaysia.

JA Malaysia recently concluded the Train Of Trainers (TOT) Workshop for all teachers involved in the Cha-Ching Curriculum. The Cha-Ching Curriculum, fully owned by Prudential is a financial literacy program designed to educate young students about the basics of money management. This program is a Teacher-Driven Model and hence all teachers had to be given a training on how to execute the program successfully in their respective school.

The series of TOT’s were held in 5 states namely Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, Putrajaya, Perak and Penang. All together there were 538 teachers from 289 schools from the abovementioned 5 states. The objective of the workshops was to educate teachers on how to inculcate 21st Century teaching techniques when conducting this program. Various guidelines and rules were also introduced to the teachers to realize the desired impact of the program to the students.

The program is designed to create good money habits with the goal of having an attitudinal change of young children towards money. The Cha-Ching Curriculum focuses on 4 concepts; Earn, Save, Spend and Donate. This year, with this program, we hope to impact 30,000 students around Malaysia.

As teachers have started conducting this program in schools, we hope to see an increase in knowledge about financial literacy and good money management skills in students.