Malaysia wants U.S. companies to participate in the
Ray Van Eng (01/30/97)
Prime Minister Mahathir seems to be hitting all the right buttons with this high tech business crowd. A 10 year tax hiatus, a 100 percent investment tax allowance, no income tax, no duties on the import of multimedia equipment, no restriction on foreign ownership of companies, a free flow of knowledge workers from around the globe, cyberlaws that promotes electronic commerce and protects intellectual property rights. No censorship of the Internet. New developments for an advance communication infrastructure to build wired smart schools and an electronic network for telemedication, virtual patient record-keeping and remote diagnosis. To top it all off, he said that by participating in the MSC project, U.S. companies will gain a foothold on the most dynamic economic regions in the world - Southeast Asia and East Asia. The MSC is "centrally located incubator for high-tech companies looking to penetrate the Pacific Rim and Asian markets," Mohathir said, and it is "an area with the infrastructure, laws, policies and practices that will enable companies to explore the Information Age without any of the usual constraints that frustrate them." The panel members presented at Mohathir's visit to California look like a who's who in the high tech business. Microsoft's chairman and CEO Bill Gates was there, so were chief executives from Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Sony, IBM, Netscape, Motorola, Apple, Compaq, Siemens, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph etc. The Microsoft chairman has indicated that Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor is one of reason that his company has decided to setup its Southeast Asia headquarters in Kuala Lumpur instead of in Singapore.
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© Copyright Ray Van Eng 1997 - 1999. All Rights Reserved.
In
a meeting with 30 top Silicon Valley executives in California in January,
Prime Minister Mahathir outlined his plan for the MSC which is designated
to be located near Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia in an area about
9 miles wide and 30 miles long. The first phase of construction will begin
in 1999.