China and IndiaEssay Preview: China and IndiaReport this essayIT IS easy to forget, now that China and India are all the rage, that until ten years ago South-East Asia was the worlds fastest-developing region, winning the sort of investor attention and breathless column inches that the two new giants now enjoy. The region has, slowly, recovered from the blight of 1997-98. It has recently had several years of strong growth (see chart 1) and its governments finances have been greatly improved. Even so, after all this time the regions five main economies–Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand–are still notable for the near-absence of companies that could truly be called world-class.
As Asia continues to grow vertiginously, it will need a lot more infrastructure, regulated or not, and YTL, says Mr Yeoh, has shown it can provide it.Hitherto, Malaysian companies have had a remarkable record of picking duds when they buy foreign firms. Laura Ashley, a fashion designer; Costain, a builder; Lec, a fridgemaker; and Agusta, a motorbike-maker: all were bought by Malaysian firms with less than glorious outcomes. Even so, if they continue to improve, YTL and the regions other conglomerates may yet break the mould.
Of the “godfatherish” firms profiled in Mr Studwells book, one that analysts say is among the best performers is YTL, a Malaysian conglomerate. Big in construction, the firm also owns a British water firm, Wessex Water, operates hotels and upmarket shopping malls, runs a high-speed rail link from central Kuala Lumpur to the citys airport and owns a chain of power stations. Its founder, Yeoh Tiong Lay, built a giant construction business with state contracts in the countrys early post-independence period. In the 1990s, when his friend Mahathir Mohamad was prime minister, the firm got concessions to generate electricity using subsidised gas from the state oil firm, which the state electricity firm was obliged to buy.
The biggest of the firms is the biggest, with a turnover of about $15 billion. Its biggest shareholder, Anco, with a turnover of about $15 billion, is also of the Chinese origin and is a subsidiary of Coca-Cola. Many Chinese companies have also had their factories privatised. Mr Studwells has the firm’s own website, which features a picture of an industrial power plant called Dongmei with the name Tengfei Tengfei. Anco bought a chunk of the plant in 2006 in the wake of a wave of corruption allegations against a rival. Anco bought the other part of the plant in 2007 over $3 billion and is holding it out to be sold by the government. Its CEO is a man who has a tattoo of the words “Coca-Cola” on his forearm, says Mr Studwells.
The companies included in the list represent “the largest and one- of the largest companies in Malaysia”.
Tengfei Tengfei is the main supplier of energy in Malaysia, for a total of $20 billion to endowments of more than 500 of the nation’s 4 million people.
And the company is a key player in Asia’s energy supply. The government has slashed subsidies for power producers and cut subsidies to producers. This led to rising prices for power. A 2015 study conducted by a group of universities in New York showed that Malaysia’s energy bill was $20.25 trillion and the cost climbed to nearly $6.9 trillion.
Malaysia has been a high-risk place, given the fact that it has one of the world’s highest rates of suicide rates. As far back as 2014, a survey by Kavak Consulting showed that the country had the highest rate of suicide in Asia and the highest rate of death by suicide in the region. In February 2016, an internal report showed that 20,000 Malaysians were already on the brink of suicide. The country’s Ministry of Health warned of a “serious health crisis” that could bring a severe decline in health service quality and the deaths would go undetected if authorities made decisions aimed at preventing it.
One of the most interesting findings from the Kavak survey is that a growing number of Malaysians are working to improve their health. A 2011 study found that in 2012 a total of 8,500 Malaysian men and women committed suicide. The country also reported a 17% jump in the numbers of suicide victims, as a percentage of the total population. The researchers have called the suicide crisis “an important milestone in the battle for clean health and wellbeing” and suggested that Malaysians commit suicide as an important component of their national strategy to achieve sustainability.
Last year, the Malaysian government opened public health offices in Kuala Lumpur, Sanya and Sulaw