Tan Sri Azman Hashim
President
MASSA 

2023 was a challenging year. Numerous headwinds resulting from geopolitical tensions, supply chain disruptions, inflationary pressures, and trade restrictions amongst others dampened the initially positive expectations for the year. Nevertheless, the global economy still performed better than expected with Japan’s remarkable post-pandemic recovery, the US aversion of recession and the Asia Pacific’s robust performance.

In spite of the challenging global context, Malaysia’s economy in 2023 grew by 3.7%, normalising from the 8.7% rebound in 2022. Headline and core inflation for 2023 averaged 2.5% and 3% respectively. Resilient domestic demand, labour market improvements, recovery in the tourism sector and supportive domestic policy are among some of the key factors that buoyed the domestic economy against headwinds that included weak external demand, commodity production & global supply chain disruptions and geopolitical tensions.

In 2024, the Malaysian economy is expected to grow at a projected 4.3 – 4.4% owing to favourable conditions in domestic expenditure, recovery of trade activity, and the upturn in the global technology cycle especially benefitting Malaysia’s E&E and semiconductor sectors.

The global outlook for 2024 is underpinned by the challenging global environment under the strain of wars, geopolitical conflict & uncertainty. The World Bank projected that global growth for 2024 to be 2.4%, while the OECD and IMF projected 2.9% and 3.1% respectively. It is expected that a soft landing would be possible owing to broadly balanced global growth particularly driven by strong optimism for growth in the Asia Pacific region, recovery of global supply chains and rising real income supported.

MASSA will continue its business engagements and collaborative efforts with Government agencies, fellow business associations, both old and new, and most importantly, with our South-South developing country partners towards raising awareness and building business preparedness for incoming trends, changes and especially, business opportunities for its membership.

MASSA is also cognisant of the developments in the sphere of human capital development, green transformation, climate change & ESG, digital transformation & AI amongst others, and we hope to bring to our readers and members’ attention these pertinent topics in an effort to raise awareness and preparedness for their respective innovation journey. I do encourage your active participation in the value-added events organised by MASSA and to deliberate their resulting opportunities.

I appreciate the continuing support and cooperation of all members, especially my fellow Executive Committee members with your attendance, participation and contributions at our regular meetings.

I also wish to thank all our supporters who have contributed valuable and insightful articles, and our sponsors of our Newsletters for 2023.

I wish everyone a happy, healthy and successful 2024. Best wishes for a ‘Selamat Hari Raya’.

Tan Sri Azman Hashim
President
9 April 2024