Responding to COVID-19 and rebooting the nation’s economy

COVID-19: Recovery and resilience

Businesses had to confront numerous challenges when the pandemic hit. Their chief concerns were figuring out how to operate remotely in a way that didn’t compromise areas like productivity, cybersecurity, cashflow, and supply chain efficiency.

While we were adapting to the new normal ourselves, we believed our capabilities put us in a position to begin a dialogue with the business community about some of the key measures they could take to strengthen resilience. From this belief came our ‘COVID-19: Recovery and Resilience’ webinar series, which ran from April to May 2020 and comprised a total of nine webinars, each dedicated to specific focus areas, from financial reporting and cyber and economic crime, to cash conservation and rethinking workforce strategy. Topics discussed were carefully put together to address the needs of the diverse segments within Malaysia’s business landscape, such as Board of Directors/C-suites, SMEs, and global mobility professionals.

Close to 2,000 virtual attendees (in total) tuned in to our webinar series, with the majority leaving feedback that the sessions were insightful and our speakers effective. The impact we made was evidenced through the opportunities received where our spokespeople were contacted post-webinar for either follow-up discussions or to speak on the same topic at external events.

Restart Malaysia

As the number of cases began to decline and Malaysia gradually emerged from its first MCO, the country came face to face with new questions, namely, how do we reboot the economy, restore businesses, and protect jobs?

To get the country back on its feet, we felt businesses and the government needed to work together on the following priorities:

Economy and finance

International affairs and security

Infrastructure

Society and living together

Education

Our perspectives were compiled in a publication aptly called ‘Restart Malaysia’, published in May 2020. Each of the five priorities above were subsequently fleshed out further by our subject matter experts in several articles under the ‘Trust in Resilience’ banner in The Edge Malaysia.

To supplement our recommendations covered in Restart Malaysia, we organised our second webinar series to further spur discussions around the collaborative effort required to achieve full recovery. Our four webinars brought in guest speakers from the public sector to join us in dialogue, where we shared our perspectives on the key tax considerations of the government’s PENJANA initiative, transforming challenges into opportunities to strengthen our digital economy, reviving our experience economy, and upskilling and reskilling strategies.

A total of over 900 participants joined our webinars, which were also well received overall. Like our ‘COVID-19: Recovery and resilience’ webinar series, our Restart Malaysia webinars also resulted in follow-up conversations with several attendees.