Sunday 27 December 2009

GST in Malaysia - Consumer woe

Malaysia's decision to implement the GST (Goods & Service Tax), come 2011 is a bit too hasty.

For some of the 143 countries who has implemented it, I say well done. Most countries started straight from the GST, unlike Malaysia who has the existing Sales Tax & Service Tax at 10% & 5% to be morphed into the single GST at 4%.

For the current 10% Sales Tax, the Ring-system is usually applied whereby in the ring of sellers to buyers, only one seller is entitled to collect the 10% Sales Tax on behalf of the Govt. while the rest are exempted.
For the GST system, at every stage of the seller-buyer transaction, a flat 4% will be collected without fail. Invariably, at the end of the line, the consumers will feel the pinch of the prices of goods to be borned.
In case most of you do not know, in the GST system, manufacturers will have no worry at all because they are allowed to 'offset' the 4% paid which they will be paying by the 4% they will be collecting when they sell.

In theory, the net selling price at the consumer end would be lower than the existing price because at each end of the selling-buying stage, the 4% would translate into a lower selling price for the next stage, in fact by about 15.6%.
However, in reality, especially in the short term, most sellers would want to maintain their absolute profit margin rather than to their profit margin rate. ( e.g. an absolute profit of RM10 calculated from 10% of selling price of RM100, would be better than a profit of 10% of the new reduced selling price of RM99).

It is hope that the short term immediate gain by the sellers ( retailers, especially) would be tapered off in the long term when new product pricings are recalculated by the manufacturers according the 4% GST rate.

After all, wouldn't a lower selling price translate into an increase of sales?

Hopefully so.

Monday 21 December 2009

HONEY, I shrunk the Chinese!

The sharp reduction of Chinese as a population ratio is contrary to natural growth patterns and an anomaly due to institutionalized discrimination. The present Chinese condition requires them to speak better BM to fit in.

No greater love hath man and moms than they lay down their life savings for their children to study overseas and emigrate.

Between March 2008 and August 2009, some 50,000 students sailed from our shores, Deputy Foreign Minister A. Kohilan Pillay told Parliament last week. The Star speculates that many will not return. Star editor Wong Sai Wan wrote: “… some even admitted that they had already applied for their PR visas”.

They are among 304,358 persons registered with Malaysia’s representative offices abroad over the past 18 months. A review of statistics will help us to interpret this unique Made-in-Malaysia export of roughly 17,000 units of human capital on average a month.

Among the ethnic groups in Malaysia, the Chinese are the largest outflow and also experiencing the biggest change in demography.

Proportion of Chinese in Malaysia total population
Year Percent
1957 45+
1970 35.6
1980 32.1
1991 26.9
2000 24.5
2010 22.6*
2035 18.6**
+ Decimal point is approximate
* Projection by Department of Statistics
** Projection in The Population of Malaysia (ISEAS)

In the 80s decade, the Chinese had a negative net migration rate of -10.6 percent. “Between 1980 and 1991, the [Chinese] migration deficit was estimated at 391,801 persons as against a national increase of 777,339 persons,” statistician Tey Nai Peng found in his study.

Chinese annual growth rate also showed a consistent drop, recording only 53 percent between 1990 and 2000 during a period when the national population grew 123 percent.
Tey said in his paper ‘Causes and consequences of demographic change in the Chinese community in Malaysia’ that “the fertility of the Chinese declined from 4.6 children to 2.5 children between 1970 and 1997”. Comparatively, total fertility rate for Malays in 1987 remained a high 4.51 when TFR for Chinese was 2.25.

Changes in the states
It is no longer true that Penang is a Chinese majority state. In 2010, Malays in Penang are projected to be 670,128 persons – outnumbering Chinese at 658,661. Between 1991 and 2000, Penang had an average annual growth rate of 1.8 percent but Penang Chinese only 0.7 percent.
Perak has significant numbers of Chinese but still, Chinese registered a negative growth of -1.0 percent in 1991-2000 whereas the average annual rate of Perak population growth was a positive 0.4 percent.

The Department of Statistics records that in the 1990s, Chinese fell in number in Kelantan, Terengganu and Perlis too. In Malacca, Negri Sembilan and Pahang, Chinese were practically stagnant.

In Sabah, Chinese were 23 percent of the population in 1960 but shrunk to 10.1 percent in 2000. “In contrast, recent immigrants and refugees, with a population of 614,824 persons in 2000, form close to a quarter of the total population, or more than twice the size of the long-settled Chinese community,” writes Danny Wong Tze-Ken in his paper ‘The Chinese population in Sabah’.
The situation in Sabah is largely a result of ‘Project M’ giving Indonesians and Muslim Filipinos Malaysian ICs. Overall, the abnormality of a shrinking Chinese population ratio can be traced to government policies that actively discriminate against this community.
Small families, ageing parents

By year 2000, Chinese were mainly concentrated in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor. The Klang Valley accounted for 38 percent of all Chinese in the Peninsula. Nine out of 10 Chinese today are found in urban areas, concentrated in the major cities.

In the dozen years between 1980 and 1991 when the Malaysian population increase nationally was 4,634,500 persons, Chinese increase was only 530,400 persons. Or looking at it another way (as indicated in table below), the Chinese are merely doubling in absolute numbers when the population will have quadrupled.

Numbers of Chinese in Malaysia
Year Chinese (million) Total population (million)
1970 3.6 10.5
1980 4.4 13.7
1991 4.9 18.4
2000 5.7 23.3
2010 6.5 28.9 *
2035 7.7 41.1 **

* Projection by Department of Statistics
** Projection in The Population of Malaysia (ISEAS)

It is conspicuous that among the younger age cohorts, Chinese are an even smaller proportion of the national average. On the other hand, among the elderly [60 years and above], Chinese constitute 5.4 percent of the population, as against the national average of 5 percent.

Among the ethnic groups in Malaysia, Chinese have the highest proportion of the elderly. “It is found that most of the ‘clients’ in nursing homes are the Chinese,” observes researcher Philip Poi Jun Hua in his essay 'Ageing among the Chinese in Malaysia: Some trends and issues'.
This situation affecting the Chinese community, with parents either in nursing homes or ‘home alone’ in Malaysia whilst the children are abroad, has ironically come about due to education as a main contributory factor.

“The Chinese community places great emphasis on education but the escalation in the cost of acquiring an education might have compelled young couples to limit their family size,” surmises Tey.
Because educated Chinese women are in the workforce as well as limiting themselves to only one or two children, Chinese couples have more money to spend on each child’s education.
This is in a way a lose-lose scenario because the couple would then tend to over-protect the single offspring – do recall China’s one-child policy outcome of producing Little Emperors – and the well-educated child is more likely to emigrate.

Self-interest vs community concerns
“All my friends plan to leave Malaysia,” a private student in the offshore campus of a premier Australian university in KL declared to me just a couple of months ago.

These youths have cogently articulated why they intend to vote with their feet. Aside from the various reasons we’re all familiar with, I’d like to introduce here the theory of ‘placelessness’ which Lee Boon Thong links to the Chinese condition.

In his paper ‘Placelessness: A study of residential neighbourhood quality among Chinese communities in Malaysia’, Lee observes that Chinese in cities have subordinated neighbourliness and personal ties to the pursuit of personal advancement.

The move to new urban and suburban residential neighbourhoods – where availability of Chinese food and access to shopping malls are often major considerations – is accompanied by other shifts, among them the increasing “technopolistic grip” [orientation towards digital entertainment] and losing some of their traditions [e.g. ancestral worship], especially if they convert to Christianity or Islam.

Lee describes the new society resulting from intense urbanization as one breeding individuals who are more self-centred, more covetous, less considerate and kiasu to boot. “Self-interest overrides almost everything else that concerns the welfare of the community.”

He also says that if the trend persists of residents in emerging neighbourhoods failing to develop ties that bind and a sufficient sense of commonness in community life, then “urban Chinese are at risk in producing a pseudo-progressive society that appears to be outwardly prosperous through its middle-class façade but in effect lacking social coherence and a sense of shared ‘placeness’ for the neighbourhood”.

Commonality as militating factor
Further aggravating this estrangement is a social milieu that is changed, parallel to the pronounced changes in demography. It is projected that while the annual growth of Bumiputera in the next decade (2011-2021) will be 1.98 percent, the corresponding growth of Chinese will be 0.73 percent.

Saw Swee Hock in his 2007 ISEAS paper ‘The Population of Malaysia’ projects that by year 2035, Malaysia will have a population of 41 million, 72.1 percent of them Bumiputera. By then Islam would have stamped a thorough dominance on the physical and moral landscape of the country.

Concomitant to this development is the fact that in the mainstream of all spheres of life and particularly official domains, the predominant speech community will be Malay.

This fait accompli of demography dictates that the minorities have to be adept in the Malay/national language for any meaningful integration to occur. Otherwise, to borrow a turn of phrase from Lee, they will be living in “proximity without propinquity” or in other words, have trouble relating to the majority.

It is thus necessary that next generation Chinese be effectively multilingual and able to ‘code switch’, i.e. use different varieties of language in different social settings. If Chinese are unable create a connectedness especially across ethnic lines, this shortcoming would just be adding another factor to the myriad push factors driving young Chinese away. The statistics tell a very sobering story.

In another short 25 years, Chinese will only be a mere 18.6 percent of the population. They will soon fall below the sustainable threshold for propagating their culture, and their diminishing numbers will only increase the pressure for assimilation – something Chinese are reluctant to do.

Written by Helen Ang
Wednesday, 09 December 2009 13:30

Sunday 18 October 2009

Unemployed Graduates

Almost all those who attended the interviews I conducted recently were University graduates, eventhough the advertisement didn't specifically mentioned so.

What does this show?
It's an indication of the number of graduates our country is churning out yearly, unqualified to be blunt. Most of the interviewee (graduates) have just been in their current employment for about 6 months or so and most of them have been working in at least 3 companies prior to that.
This brings me to the subject of today- Unemployed Graduates: just how many are there & why are they there?


UNEMPLOYED GRADUATES*
In 2004, there were 4,594 unemployed graduates of which 163 were Chinese, 207 were Indians and 4,060 were Malays;
In 2005, there were 2,413 unemployed graduates of which 31 were Chinese, 70 were Indians and 2,186 were Malays;
In 2006, there were 56,750 unemployed graduates of which 1,110 were Chinese, 1,346 were Indians and 50,594 were Malays.
In 2007, there were 56,322 unemployed graduates of which 1,348 were Chinese, 1,401 were Indians and 49,075 were Malays.
In 2008 (as of June) there were 47,910 unemployed graduates of which 1,403 Chinese, 1,569 Indians and 44938 were Malays.



University & Percentage of Graduates Unemployed
Universiti Teknologi Mara 16.2%
Universiti Utara Malaysia 7.6%
Private Universities & Colleges 6.0%
University Teknologi Malaysia 5.7%
University Kebangsaan Malaysia 4.8%
University Pertanian Malaysia 4.5%
Other Public Universities 4.2%
Universiti Malaya 2.6%
Universiti Sains Malaysia 2.5%
Universiti Malaysia Sabah 1.8%
Universiti Islam Antarabangsa 1.8%
Foreign Graduates 1.7%
Universiti Malaysia Sarawak 0.9%
Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris 0.2%
Others 39.5%

Out of the total unemployed graduates, 70% were from the Public Universities & 26% from Private Universities.

Remember also that prior to 1969 (year of the May 13 incident), there were just 2 Public Universities. Between 1969 & 1999, nine Universities were set up & thereafter another nine.

No wonder the friendly burgerman next door was a graduate.

Thursday 8 October 2009

University of Malaya inside Top 200!

University of Malaya up to 180 from 200 last year! What jubilations....but wait, National University of Singapore is ranked 30 and Nanyang Technological University at 77. Good try , maybe next year we may break the under 100 barrier.

We hope the standards of our University graduates will improve in years to come but not right in the foreseeable future, what with the current entry selection criteria.

I have interviewed countless candidates for job positions in the companies I worked with and most aspiring applicants never ceased to awe me. Poor spoken English, lack of knowledge in the fields whose jobs they were looking for. About 85% of them didn't know what jobs they were applying for!( You see, nowadays ready-made resume are available and these job aspirants just didn't know which positions they were looking for when the time came for them to be interviewed...and they just don't care. When asked for the positions they were looking for, a few answered " any positions available"!

If the Government is just interested in churning out pre-packed graduates from our Universities, I say let them expire after their time out on the shelves.

Tuesday 6 October 2009

Additional Costs of Exporting to Venezuela

Recently, I have the misfortune to witness the immense red tapes it took me to process the shipping documentations and procedures just to ship some products to Venezuela. Officially it is called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the people there speak Spanish. Population about the same as Malaysia ,26m.
Be ready to cover all hidden costs and set your selling price straight or you may end up a few thousand ringgit poorer.
Almost all shipping docs must be endorsed by various approving authorities before you may ship or unload your cargo at destination.
For a start,

EXPORT TO VENEZUELA ---Legalisation of documents
Docs required:
1. Registration of Co. cert (ROC).. Form 9
2. Memorandum of Article & Association
3. Particulars of Board of Directors ..Form 49
4. Company registered address..Form 44
5. Manufacturing license
6. General commercial letter
7. Certificate of Origin (CO)
8. Commercial Invoice
9. Packing List
10. Bill of Lading

Most of these docs have to be notarised by a Notary Public, Authenticated by the Ministry of Foreign Affair and then legalised by the Venezuela Embassy.
Of course, the CO has to be issued by FMM or the Chamber of Commerce.

Moneywise, it will cost RM50 to get each docs notarised and RM199 to get each doc(6~10) legalised by the Venezuela Embassy. We are grateful that Wisma Putra does not charge anything, I think. By the way, it costs RM266 to get the CO legalised by the Venezuela Embassy!
(Well, just a rubber stamped..)

All in, minimum RM1542..it may be more.

And mind you, we have not even touch on the port, forwarding, Custom, etc charges at destination yet.

So for those of you who are thinking of exporting anything to this South American northern coastal country, compute your costing carefully to recoup your profit margin.

Sunday 13 September 2009

Mamula Moon -Terang Bulan - Negaraku

Yeap! The STAR reported that there's this group in Indonesia trying to sweep Malaysians in Central Jakarta. It's real scary what our not so friendly neigbour can do at the slightest opportunity available, right or wrong.



Pic shows the group checking suspected cars for Malaysians.

The Indonesians also accused Malaysia for stealing their Balinese pendet dance after the Discovery Channel promotion clip, which was later admitted and apologised as an error by Discovery Channel.

Actually, just as some Malaysians wanted to 'bully' the Singaporeans and act as the taikor, some Indonesians also wanted to 'bully' Malaysians and act as our taikor too!
So our Govt earlier policy of importing these Indonesians to Malaysia has backfired because the latter never appreciated the 1.5million job opportunities created for them. I say we should just reduce the dependence on them and get the Myanmars, Nepalese, Bangladeshis, Indians and why not ( sic), the PRC Chinese to replace them. Then it's Malaysia truly Asia la la.

But the one thing I get pissed off is this their claiming the Negaraku was copied from their Terang Bulan. To get the matter straight, it was found out later that Terang Bulan was actually copied from an old Hawaiian song called Mamula Moon!


Hear the You Tube songs below and judge for yourself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4o_kissLWU


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPcNnHEsFM0



But I still can't get it...if it was so obvious, why didn't anybody detect that our very own National Anthem was not the original for the last 50 over years ?
The recent upbeat edition...was it meant to be a ...?? Naw, couldn't be. Or maybe.

Sunday 9 August 2009

Drop PPSMI only at primary school level.

The other day, a friend just lamented his son's plight when he will be in Form 4 in three years time. Yes, he's in Form 1 now and both Maths & Science are taught in English; come 2012 and presto!, it will be in Bahasa Malaysia again (or is it Bahasa Melayu? er...).
The Govt has been flip-flopping the PPSMI issue and the ultimate guinea pigs are our budding future leaders of the country. Of course, all these smack of political and racial undertones which could have been a win-win situation if PPSMI has been allowed to be continued at the secondary schools.
As it is, both the Malays and Chinese ( and to a certain extent, the Indians) wanted to retain their mother tongues and thought it would be better and easier for their kids to study in their mother tongues.
One thing though, the Govt went one step further and will drop PPSMI altogether all the way till Form Six. Then the Govt just announced that the Universities will carry on as usual in the English language.
My personal observation and experience tells me that the people who are going to suffer are the Malay students. Traditionally, most non-Malay students have propensities to do well in multi-languages, given their unique situation in a multi-racial Malaysia. They have to converse with their Malays friends in Bahasa, to their Indian friends in English and to their Chinese friends in Mandarin or the various Chinese dialects! I have interviewed scores of job applicants in the private sectors and sad to say, even with the current PPSMI policy, most of the Malay graduate (at tertiary level) applicants did not present themselves well in English ( in a score of 1 to 10, 10 being the most proficient in the English language, 98% of the Malay applicants marked 3~4 ). Of course, there is no problem in speaking in our Bahasa but the fact remains that in the private sector, most of the dealings and documentations are in English. We deal with the Japanese, Italians, Americans, British, Chinese, etc all in English ( and you wonder why these foreigners also deal with us in English, right?) and it would not benefit the employer and their business if it were not so. This is the real business world.

Unless one is looking for a Govt job.

I say the Govt has erred in dropping PPSMI at the secondary and tertiary educational levels.
maybe there's still time to reverse the decision ,before 2012.

Monday 27 July 2009

The Taking of the PELHAM123



Aiyahhh!!!!!!Really have no time these days. Just reading those Malaysia Today, Rocky's Bru,Uncle Lim,Malaysian Insider,Nut Graph....is enough to make you slumber at 1am.



Last Friday while waiting for my little ballerina, I crept off to check up on The Taking of the PELHAM 123. My, it was suspense all the way from start till the end. Didn't have time to pee eventhough the bladder was full to the brim. John Travolta was a real crazy bastard, but anyone knows why he wanted to die at Denzel Washington's hand?? Washington who? That guy was damn so bulky I nearly couldn't recognise him. Can't remember when was the last time i saw his movie. In reverse, Travolta looked fit to me. Couldn't see his stomach, which the director did a good job of hiding.

Well PELHAM was about 3 psychos who wanted to blackmail the Mayor into parting 10m bucks or else they will kill off the subway hostages, 1 each for each minute delay after time's up. They meant it and i think about 2 poor innocent guys were killed in cold blood. Sic! Actually Travolta was planning on a more than 300m bucks taking from the gold commodity market due to the hostages-taking event.

Why don't you go watch the movie? Save a lot of my time here.

And make sure you pooh first 'coz it's not allowed inside !!!#$