Asean Business Advisory Council (BAC) Malaysia chairman Tan Sri Nazir Razak expressed his optimism that Asean, now becoming more realistic, will achieve its objectives, especially in achieving its targets and goals.
He was speaking during a panel session titled 'Reinforcing Regional Economic Integration for a Resilient ASEAN' at the ASEAN Economic Opinion Leaders Conference: Outlook for 2025 on Thursday (Jan 9).
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He was speaking during a panel session titled 'Reinforcing Regional Economic Integration for a Resilient ASEAN' at the ASEAN Economic Opinion Leaders Conference: Outlook for 2025 on Thursday (Jan 9).
Read more at https://bit.ly/40uplry
WATCH MORE: https://thestartv.com/c/news
SUBSCRIBE: https://cutt.ly/TheStar
LIKE: https://fb.com/TheStarOnline
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NewsTranscript
00:00I've been in this game for a very long time and at the moment I'm feeling more mystic about ASEAN than I have in a long time.
00:13Firstly, on the global decoupling, definitely this disruption is a huge opportunity for ASEAN.
00:22Secondly, I have never seen a convergence of internationalist leaders across ASEAN as we have today.
00:33If you look at the big economies, you've got Anwar Mankos, Propo and Lawrence Wong, all internationalists.
00:40And even the small economies, you've got Khun Manet in Cambodia who is very different to his father in terms of outlook on the world and also about ASEAN.
00:52The third reason, and this is probably the most important, is I think today in ASEAN we are more realistic.
01:00We have learnt lessons, hard lessons from the past.
01:04Let's be very clear, 2007 the ASEAN Charter, the ASEAN Economic Community 2015 was overly ambitious.
01:13We set a target of single production base, free movement of people, free movement of investments, free movement of skilled labour.
01:21We got to 2015, ASEAN looks nothing like the ASEAN Economic Community that was promised.
01:27This is not saying that ASEAN didn't achieve a lot. It achieved a lot, but the targets were too high.
01:32And for policy makers, just to say that when you set policies that are too high, there is also a cost because businesses prepare for too much.
01:42And I come at this with personal experience because CIMB that I ran at that time was over prepared for an integrated ASEAN at some cost.
01:56So again, ASEAN I think is now more realistic, more aware of what it can do, what it cannot do.
02:06However, being realistic doesn't mean you shouldn't and mustn't mean that you shouldn't be unambitious.
02:18You must be ambitious and here my view is that we need to set priorities with specific deliverables.
02:25Two is what you want to deliver must create value and three is in the delivery you must get proper partnership engagement between the government, the private sector and the ASEAN Secretariat.
02:42You must work as a team and here again, based on experience, engagement is very important.
02:49I think there is a cultural issue within ASEAN that is frustrating which is this, that you can go to a meeting and you propose an idea and 90% of the room disagrees with you and you won't know.
03:05People who disagree just don't say anything.
03:07So you think you walk out of the meeting, you think everybody's agreed but actually nothing gets done because actually they didn't agree.
03:15So this culture is an issue we have to overcome.
03:20I think if you really want to get things done is we put ideas across, we debate it and if you agree with it, if you don't agree speak up and once we finish, we all push the idea as if it was ours.
03:34The private sector, the government, the ASEAN Secretariat, we push the idea as if it was ours and that's I think how we achieve good progress in terms of integration.
03:43Now, going into specifics, we at ASEAN BARC have a list of 12 initiatives we want to push in 2025.
03:54For those of you who are less familiar, ASEAN Business Advisory Council is the main private sector body for ASEAN integration and this year was my chair as Malaysia's chair.
04:06So as chair we set the agenda for the year and just a couple of projects I want to highlight.
04:12One is we put up this idea of an ASEAN Prospectus which is for company seeking listing.
04:19You can choose to have, when you want to be listed say in the Polun Post Focus Exchange, you can choose to use a Malaysian prospectus or an ASEAN prospectus.
04:31If you choose a Malaysian prospectus, you can raise money from investors in Malaysia.
04:36If you choose an ASEAN prospectus, then you can raise money from right across ASEAN.
04:42I think this is an idea that will bring our markets closer together.
04:47It's an idea that we tabled to the Malaysian Securities Commission.
04:50They like the idea. They arranged for us to meet the ASEAN Capital Market Forum, all the ASEAN regulators and everybody likes the idea.
04:58I think that everyone was very clear at the Capital Market Forum.
05:02They said, okay, this country said we think we can join you next year.
05:06The other country said, no, we cannot join you next year but give us a few years, we will join you.
05:10I think that kind of way of moving something forward can be very, very productive.
05:17So that's one idea.
05:19Two, our second idea is actually more important.
05:22It's this whole notion of an ASEAN Business Entity.
05:26Now, this is more complex, more contentious, but I think it could be the single biggest move forward in ASEAN business that we've seen.
05:40So basically, the notion is this, that we realise that the single production-based recruitment of people isn't going to happen.
05:49It isn't going to happen because politically it just cannot sell.
05:53But at the same time, we need ASEAN economies of scale for our businesses.
05:58How are our businesses going to compete with Chinese businesses that have 1.5 million customers, the European businesses that are fully integrated and so on.
06:09So if you want to do both, the only way you do it is actually avail that economies of scale at the company level.
06:17So our recommendation is that ASEAN member countries have this category of ASEAN Business Entity.
06:26And when you qualify as an ASEAN Business Entity, then you get the benefits of freely moving people, freely moving operations.
06:34So in this case, if we say Malaysia decides that UOB is an ASEAN Business Entity, what does that mean?
06:42That means UOB can move its staff from Singapore or any other market to Malaysia freely.
06:47It can outsource its operations for its Malaysian operations.
06:51It can outsource back office to Manila or whatever freely with no restrictions.
06:56So that gives the reality to UOB of a single ASEAN market without the rest of ASEAN, the free movement of everybody etc, which is politically impossible.
07:09Now this, I think is an idea that we need to push forward. We are pushing, but again, we can't do it alone.
07:17We need governments, we need ASEAN Secretariat to come along with this idea.
07:23So just to put that out there for today, I think I'm not going to go through all of our initiatives at this stage.
07:32Just to put those two as an example of how I think we can do a lot more with ASEAN.
07:37We're ambitious but very careful, but how we execute those ambitions and God willing, under Malaysia's chairmanship, we will achieve some of them.
07:48Thank you UOB.