“When Liberation Day hit, we didn’t panic,” Amir Hamzah Azizan, Malaysia’s Finance Minister II and YB Senator Datuk Seri, explained Monday during the Fortune Innovation Forum in Kuala Lumpur. “We weren’t going out there and saying ‘I’m going to reset my [growth] targets,” he said.
Instead, he suggested Malaysia’s broad trade ties to countries like Singapore, China, and the U.S. helped it withstand shocks from any one particular country. “The Malaysian economy has very deep diversification,” he explained, noting no market makes up more than a 30% share of the country’s exports.
Instead, Malaysia needs to have both financial discipline and targeted investment whose returns flow back into society, in an approach the finance minister called “lifting the ceiling, lifting the floor.” Malaysia has made tough decisions to balance the budget, including raising some taxes and reducing diesel and fuel subsidies.
Still, Amir Hamzah noted that only the top 15% of Malaysians reported an increase in their electricity bills, which he characterized as being part of the country’s energy transition.
“We have a clear direction forward of how we are going to transition the economy into greener power,” said Amir Hamzah. This includes greater use of renewables such as solar and hydro as well as importing clean electricity through an expanded ASEAN power grid.
Malaysia will also encourage the country’s power-hungry data centers to operate more efficiently and use less water, he said.
“We are not at the top end of the chain…so we are not a threat to the aspirations of the U.S., who wants to bring a lot of things back home,” Amir Hamzah explained. “What we’re doing is [staying] in the middle…and increase the complexity of the economy, and as we do more of that, we strengthen the value chain.”
Long term, Amir Hamzah said Malaysia was a reliable partner to global companies–including those from the U.S. and China. “Our proposition to both is to say we are key to your long-term supply chain,” he said. “We provide 80 million goods that you need in the long-term to support your growth.”
