By Suben Dali Ravindran
Datuk Seri Ahmad Husni Hanadzlah
The fear of failure rate among Malaysian entrepreneurs has come down significantly over the past four years to 36 per cent in 2012 from 65 per cent in 2009. The rate was based on a survey of 2,000 adults in the country as reported in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2012 (GEM) report. Second Finance Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Husni Hanadzlah said the trend demonstrated that entrepreneurial pursuits were being shaped and focused on available opportunities, while signalling an increasing rate of innovation initiatives, and improvement in the country’s economic situation. Citing the GEM 2012 Global Report, he said Malaysia’s early-stage entrepreneurial activity rate for last year grew to seven per cent from 4.4 per cent in 2009.
The improvement, he said was in-line with the business condition in Malaysia whereby the country’s businesses were now far more sustainable as compared to four years before. Husni said the rate of new businesses survived beyond beyond 42 months grew to seven per cent in 2012 from 4.2 per cent in 2009, surpassing developed nations such as United Kingdom (six per cent) and Germany (five per cent).
“This increase, driven mainly by improvement-driven opportunity entrepreneurship as compared to necessity-driven entrepreneurship, is indeed encouraging,” he said at the launch of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2012 here today. “We are, of course, cognisant of the fact that South Korea’s retention rate is 10 per cent and China is 12 per cent. This is something which we want to improve on,” he said.
Towards this, the government is providing greater attention towards improving entrepreneurs’ capabilities such as a variety of measures undertaken through advisory services, coaching, training and funding via government agencies including Cradle Fund Sdn Bhd, SME Corp, Malaysian Biotechnology Corp and Multimedia development Corp. He added that the agencies under his ministry and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry had augmented the status of local entrepreneurship and, in turn, had established a positive perception of entrepreneurship as a career.
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