The Growing Malaysian Software Economy
Last October I shared a few thoughts on a study that we conduct with IDC every year looking at the net impact of Microsoft’s business on the ecosystem of partners,developers and other service companies around us. The headline is that we measure part of our relevance in markets where we do business in terms of the number of dollars generated locally compared to every dollar of revenue that we generate directly as a company.
In Asia in general the local software and services economies generate around eleven dollars for every dollar of direct Microsoft revenue when working on Microsoft related projects. In some ways the figure is a health indicator, Microsoft has always been reliant on our partners using our platform to develop and deploy solutions of their own, the more these partners succeed the healthier our long term business is.
That said this is a study that we commission, and it is always helpful to hear this data being backed up by external voices.
We were fortunate enough to have Dato’ Badlisham Ghazali, the CEO of MSC Malaysia, talk at Teched’08 SEA earlier this week and he touched on the size and scale of the software economy in Malaysia. He talked about the role of the Microsoft related activity in the Multimedia Super Corridor initiative in the country.
The Star Online reports the following from Dato’ Ghazali’s keynote;
MSC Malaysia companies on the Microsoft platform generated close to RM3bil in revenue at the end of 2006, said the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), guardian of the MSC Malaysia initiative. This is an increase of 44% from the RM2.05bil made in 2005.
These companies were also responsible for 77% of the MSC Malaysia revenue in 2005. How much they account for MSC Malaysia’s 2006 revenues will only be available next month, said MDeC, which explained that the late numbers are because the figures need to be audited before being released.
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The growth was generated by companies developing security, business intelligence, and customer relationship management solutions on the Microsoft platform, he added. There are about 319 active MSC Malaysia software companies that are running on that platform.
RM3bn is about US$1bn.
Of course these numbers are just a representative slice (the Microsoft related slice) of the success that the MSC initiative has been driving in Malaysia as a whole. It is useful to see the study that we do with IDC externally validated on some level, and very encouraging to see the amount of revenue generated by companies working with our platform in Malaysia continue to grow!
