Categories: Business NewsTransport and logistics

DHL Express CEO Emphasizes the Importance of Maintaining Malaysia’s Appeal for FDI

DHL Express CEO Emphasizes the Importance of Maintaining Malaysia's Appeal for FDI

NEW DELHI, March 19 — Malaysia will continue to be successful as long as it remains an attractive place to invest, makes it easy to do business and builds up its infrastructure, said DHL Express chief executive officer (CEO) John Pearson.

“Countries just carry on doing the things that make it attractive to invest in, making it easy to do business. (The ease of) Setting up the infrastructure for domestic and inbound outbound logistics will continue to make Malaysia successful.” he said at the launch of DHL Global Connectedness Report 2024.

Ease of doing business

“These efforts may attract investments and make it easier to do business there.”

While Malaysia’s ranking in terms of global connectivity slipped from 24th in 2017 to 26th in 2022, he believes the Malaysian government has done all the right things to improve its connectivity.

Pearson said despite the drop in the ranking, Malaysia still outperformed many other peers because Malaysia would remain competitive moving forward as the country is one of the beneficiaries of the China Plus One strategy, along with Vietnam, Philippines, Mexico,Turkey and other countries.

Steven A. Altman explains the drop in rankings

China Plus One strategy is a business approach that companies, especially multinational corporations, adopted to diversify their investments outside China.

Responding to the question about the score versus the rank, the scores are relative to other countries who are trying to rank is relative to other countries, whereas the score represents the actual change in the level of globalisation, said Senior Research Scholar and Director of the DHL Initiative on Globalization, NYU Stern Steven A. Altman

Malaysia an outperformer

“In this case over that specific five year period later became more globally connected but it was in a period where most countries were also increasing levels of connectedness. And so just relative to the others, the other countries around Malaysia in that part of the ranking were rising faster, and so the rank actually declined slightly. ”

“Overall, what we’ve seen is Malaysia tends to be an out performer in our metrics.”

Published regularly since 2011, the renowned DHL Global Connectedness Report (previously DHL Global Connectedness Index) provides reliable findings on globalisation trends by analysing 15 types of international trade, capital, information, and people flows. The 2024 edition is based on almost nine million data points.

It ranks the connectedness of 181 countries, accounting for 99.7 percent of the world’s gross domestic product and 98.7 percent of its population.

A collection of 181 one-page country profiles provides concise summaries of individual countries’ globalisation patterns.