KUCHING: The int roduction and establishment of Sarawak Multimedia Authority (SMA), the brain child of the Chief Minister, is timely and will enable the ministry to maximise the potential of digital technology and digitalization to bring Sarawak to the wider digital playfield.
Minister of International Trade and E-Commerce, Dato Sri Wong Soon Koh said the introduction and establishment of SarawakPay which was launched Wednesday by the Chief Minister, Datuk Patinggi (Dr) Abang Johari Tun Openg is another milestone which Sarawak had achieved in its digital transformation initiatives.
He said it will facilitate and enhance the development of eCommerce in Sarawak and it will enable people to go cashless when paying for their utility bills by just using their smartphones.
“Such initiatives will augur well for the development of eCommerce because SarawakPay is also planned to be linked with AliPay, the mobile payment system developed by China’s Internet eCommerce giant, Alibaba.com.
“This initiative will allow our local business community to start their business transactions by using either SarawakPay or AliPay,” he said in his winding up speech at the State Legislative Assembly (DUN) sitting here yesterday. According to the statistics given by eMarketer.com, he said the retail of eCommerce sales worldwide had increased from USD1.5 trillion in 2015 to USD2.3 trillion in 2017.
“The value is expected to double in 2020 to about USD4.1 trillion. In term of internet users in South East Asia Region, as of January 2017, about 53 percent of the 644.1 million is connected to internet and about 306 million or 47 percent are active social media users.
“The growth are also significant where since January 2016, the increase in internet users is 31 percent, active social media users 31 percent, mobile subscriptions 8 percent and active mobile social media is 36 percent,” he said.
It is interesting to note that in Malaysia alone, Wong said the average hours of its people spending time on internet in a day is 2.4 hours in 2014 and it had increased to 2.7 hours in 2016. Similarly, he said the percentage of mobile users who are using the internet had increased from 74.3 percent in 201 4 to 90.7 percent in 2015.
However, he said there is a slight decrease to 89.3 percent in 216 due to the increase of mobile subscribers.“ Such situation had indicated that there are great potentials for eCommerce in this region.
It is therefore important for Sarawak not to be lagging behind in the present new era of technology that had brought about so much rapid development in today’s fast changing and borderless world of online business,” Wong explained.
During the Chief Minister recent visit to Estonia in September this year, Wong said Johari and his delegates had seen for themselves on how the digital economy had made a small country with a small population, prosper and enabled its people to enjoy better living standards.
Mirroring Sarawak with the success of e-Estonia, he said Johari had also envisaged maximising the potential of digital technology and digitalization to bring Sarawak to the global playing field. “The dream of our Chief Minister is for Sarawak to be known as SSarawak meaning ‘Smart Sarawak’,” he added. He therefore said that MITeC Sarawak is ready to accept the challenge and embrace this development to enable Sarawak to stay relevant and to compete with other more advanced economies of the world.
