The Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) has rolled out the Micro and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs) e-commerce campaign, an initiative under the National Economic Recovery Plan (PENJANA).
The campaign begins as of July 2020 and will last until the end of September 2020.
In a statement today, MDEC said the MSME e-commerce campaign aims to encourage e-commerce adoption by local businesses to help widen their market reach.
“MSMEs and local businesses wishing to participate in the campaign may register via www.go-ecommerce.my/PENJANA,” it said.
Under the PENJANA recover plan, MDEC has mentioned that the Malaysian government has allocated up to RM70 million to implement the campaign to facilitate local businesses in maintaining their operations and gradually upgrading their productivity.
The campaign involves 10 e-commerce partners, including Boost, Foodpanda, Grab, Lazada, Maybank, Shopee and Touch ‘n Go eWallet, and more e-commerce partners are expected to participate.
An estimated 145,000 SMEs are expected to benefit from the e-commerce onboarding training, seller subsidy, and sales support.
The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated consumers’ shift towards online shopping. As such, MDEC’s CEO, Surina Shukri, believes that helping SMEs shift towards e-commerce will help future-proof the economy in a post-COVID environment.
“Shifting to e-commerce will help MSMEs reduce operation costs, improve agility and be more responsive to new opportunities, allowing them to reach new customers within existing markets and expand to new markets,” she said.
Surina said with the uptake in online retail sales, the Southeast Asian e-commerce market is looking to be worth about US$153 billion by 2025.
In addition to the implementation of SME e-commerce campaigns, the government has allotted an additional RM70 million to kick-start the Shop Malaysia Online initiative. This second e-commerce initiative under PENJANA will run for two months, starting in August 2020.
The Shop Malaysia Online initiative is designed to spur economic recovery by stimulating online consumption through digital vouchers for the consumers.
