Autodesk’s Post-Budget Commentary Malaysia National Budget 2009

Tan Choon Sang, Country Manager, Autodesk Malaysia

The government’s initiative under Budget 2009 to ease the burden of Malaysians in view of rising material and energy costs and to enhance productivity is necessary to encourage growth and positive business sentiments. The continued commitment towards developing the five economic corridors (such as Iskandar Malaysia, NCER, ECER, SCORE and SDC) will also stimulate and ensure a more sustained growth for the construction and property sector.

With the continuous emphasis to drive IT adoption, Autodesk is confident that technology, used appropriately upfront in the initial process will help enhance efficiency and cost-savings in the design and building phase. We welcome the move by the government to enhance the role of businesses in the economy by allowing the expenses incurred on ICT equipment, which is currently claimed over two years to be accelerated to one year under the Accelerated Capital Allowance scheme. This paves way to great opportunity for the architecture, construction, building as well as the manufacturing industry to look at new building and design techniques to improve coordination and drive savings in time and cost.

Human capital development remains one of the key challenges for the ICT industry and we laud the government’s continuing emphasis to invest in nurturing talent to create a pool of trained and competitive workforce by allocating some RM47.7 billion for education and training.

The private sector can support this by driving up-skilling campaigns and Public Private Partnership initiatives where both parties invest to jointly promote a more knowledge-based society to meet the demands of today’s employers. Autodesk has been working with key institutions across Malaysia. With the support of the Ministry of Higher Learning, Autodesk has organised design competitions, aimed at providing a platform for Malaysian tertiary students to showcase their talent in design creativity and innovation, and also initiatives to implement a Skills Development Programme for public institutions under the Ministry of Higher Education’s umbrella, amongst others.

We are also happy to note that the government has given a mandate to the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) to provide almost 100,000 industrial training opportunities to encourage more skilled workers especially in the construction industry. This will not only generate a more productive construction sector, but an improved skill-set that can help boost the export of our local construction services internationally.

Although education and awareness are very important, leadership has to come from the authorities. Governments have a significant role to drive the adoption of green building concepts through legislature and incentives. Building codes and standards should be updated to reflect sustainable designs. As one of the few vendors that take a leadership role in promoting the awareness of sustainability, we would like to see greater participation from the private sector to embrace the adoption of green building. Training incentives or subsidies should be provided to encourage the adoption of technology (use of new materials, use of design technology, etc). We would also like to see greater incentives or subsidies to construction and related companies to encourage the implementation of world-class technology solutions and infrastructure.