Source : Internet
Former Vice President at Morgan Stanley (company)
MA in Physics, University of Oxford
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How is the Malaysian economy performing right now?
I was in Kuala Lumpur a few weeks ago for a couple of weeks.
Long-time readers will know I've been openly bullish on Malaysia for a while now. After that trip, my conviction has only deepened.
Something clicked for me on this visit: it hit me that Malaysia has arrived. KL doesn't feel like a step down from Singapore or Dubai anymore - it feels like a peer. Granted, I was based in KLCC the whole time, but the city centre rivals anything in London or Paris, and in some respects it feels more modern, especially after the local council's clean-up around the Covid years. The Singapore comparison kept coming to mind.
One memory that's stuck with me: on the way to the airport, we stopped at IOI City Mall, the third-largest shopping mall on the planet. It's a solid 40 minutes of motorway from the centre. I told my wife on the way in that it seemed daft to plonk a mall this far out - KL already has more giant malls than it knows what to do with, surely it'd be dead. I was completely wrong. The place was heaving with middle-class Malaysians. They keep building these things, and they keep filling up.
The data tells the same story your eyes do. Q1 GDP came in at an annualised 5.3%. Microsoft is committing $2.2B to data centres in the country, Google another $2B, AWS $6.2B, and Oracle $6.5B. The hyperscalers have made their pick for a Southeast Asian base - and it's Malaysia.
The reasons are stacked: world-class infrastructure, absurdly low cost of business and living, political stability, a PM in Anwar who's actually delivering, English spoken everywhere, and a flood of Chinese tourists, Chinese cars, and Chinese business partnerships fuelling growth. The neighbourhood is peaceful and likely to stay that way - Malaysia and its neighbours do not have expansionist ambitions on their neighbours' lands. And the workforce is young, educated, and multilingual (with a charming habit of tacking "lah" onto most sentences, like this, lah).
I lived in Malaysia for 17 years and still can't get enough of it. The food is unbeatable, the people are warm and humble, the weather is brilliant. I'll be back before long.
So how is the Malaysian economy performing right now? Very well. It's growing at a pace most developed economies would kill for, attracting tens of billions in foreign direct investment from the world's biggest tech firms, and pulling its middle class up the wealth curve at a visible pace. If you're weighing up where to migrate or where to put your business, Malaysia Truly Asia deserves a serious look, lah.
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