KUALA LUMPUR: The awareness among small and medium entrepreneurs (SMEs) on the free trade agreements (FTAs) and their benefits is still low, said Deputy Minister of International Trade and Industry, Datuk Ahmad Maslan.
He urged SMEs to fully capitalise on the benefits and grab the opportunities offered by FTAs, especially the incentives provided by the government in its international trade ventures.
“SMEs made up over 98.5 per cent registered businesses in Malaysia and only contributed about 18.6 per cent of Malaysian exports.
“Hence, the continued efforts by the government and its agencies are still needed to help the local SMEs get them adapt to new business culture to enhance their capabilities and capacities,” he told reporters after officiating a seminar jointly organised by Malaysia External Trade Development Corp (Matrade) and Yayasan Amal Maaruf Malaysia yesterday.
The seminar, themed ‘Exploring International Markets with Matrade’, aims to address fears to venture overseas by providing insights on exporting. It attracted about 150 participants, including those from Sabah and Sarawak who are keen to start export ventures.
Ahmad said in line with the effort to promote Malaysian products and services the government had strengthened its involvement with the trading partners via FTAs.
To-date, Malaysia had signed bilateral FTAs with Japan, Pakistan, New Zealand, India, Chile, Australia and Turkey while through Asean it also had multilateral agreements with China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand, he said.
Ahmad said SMEs must be prepared to embrace digital technologies in their efforts to access global markets such as e-commerce.
The e-commerce was 13 times faster compared to brick and mortar businesses, he said.
He said the challenges, however, lay in the capabilities of SMEs to digitalise and learn the new and future technologies, as well as financial capacities in addressing the money back guarantees required on digital platform such Ali Baba’s e-commerce platform.
Meanwhile, Matrade’s deputy chief executive officer, Export Development, Sharimahton Mat Salleh, said Matrade aime to list about 1,500 SMEs on Ali Baba’s platform in the first phase.
To date, about 850 SMEs were on board, he said.
“Matrade is positive to achieve the target in short period of time and hoped in the next phases more SMEs would be able to get listed on the platform,” she said.
She urged companies to leverage on the subsidies provided by government for the platform listing whereby SMEs would be given RM5,000 as subsidy from over RM6,000 listing fees required by the platform.
“Those listed will also be given value-added services such micro site listing, showcase, as well as training given by Alibaba.com and its agents in Malaysia to enable the companies to attract visitors to their product sites,” she said. — Bernama