Malaysia is a diverse country located at the heart of South East Asia and one of the member states of ASEAN, while Greater KL is the metropolitan capital of this beautiful nation. Being a multicultural, multilingual, and multi-ethnic, there are many benefits as to why Greater KL is amongst the most dynamic Asian business addresses for MNCs to set up as their regional hub.
The World Bank claimed in their 2018 Ease of Doing Business Report, that Malaysia is the easiest country in the world to conduct businesses in. There are many good reasons why setting up a regional hub in Greater KL should be in all MNC’s serious consideration.
- Strategic location within Asia Pacific
- Heavy participation from public and private sectors.
- Competitive business environment.
- Little to no restrictions for foreign shareholding, whereby businesses can be 100% foreign owned.
- English is widely spoken, along with Malay, several Chinese dialects, Indian dialects and many more.
- Several liberalisation programs in place to welcome foreign investments.
- Well-developed infrastructure.
- Opening corporate bank account is straightforward process.
- Presence of many international banking corporations.
- Strong legal framework governance.
- World-class education system.
- Highly education workforce.
- Cost-effective labor/ workforce and other operation costs.
- Affordable and excellent healthcare system.
Other than that, there are also many initiatives available for MNCs to access to certain tax advantages, such as Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) and TRX’s tax incentives for financial companies just to mention a few. Positioning Greater KL as the ideal destination for a regional hub, as a few existing MNC has demonstrated.
InvestKL’s CEO Datuk Zainal Amanshah added that many MNCs with regional business services have established some footprint in Greater KL, which in turn provides high-value employment opportunities. “Their investments here is a resounding testament to KL’s conducive ecosystem combined with the range and strength of high skilled talents that are available and transforms our economy to become more vibrant and sustainable.”
One of the MNCs that has established its regional hub for APAC here in greater KL, Accenture, a leading global management consulting and professional services firm, has three Intelligent Operations Centres here to support clients worldwide with high value jobs in Marketing, Finance & Accounting and Sourcing & Procurement services. Benefitting from Greater KL’s strategic location and diversity, their centres here support up to 23 languages and the highly educated workforce enables them to help their clients leverage on intelligent operations and add value to their businesses.
Yet another global leader, PersolKelly Consulting that had chosen Greater KL as their regional hub, offering Human Resources consulting, analytics and technology via innovative talent development, management advisory and insight driven solutions, again tapping into Greater KL’s agile talents and extensive business ecosystem.
Both MNCs are experiencing rapid growth trajectory, overseeing massive workforce development. As things are, there are already several global leading MNCs in various industries looking to set up their respective footprints here, most notably Microsoft, Amazon and Google have shown interest in developing Malaysia into a regional hub for information technology (IT).
To end things, one can only expect this trend to continue, putting Greater KL on the global map for MNCs all around to take notice.