Malaysia on track to become a smart nation - MCMC

Malaysia is on track in expanding communication capacity and coverage towards becoming a smart nation by 2020, said Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) Head of Division for Market Regulation, Laila Hassan.

She said based on the Industry Performance Report 2014, Malaysia's mobile phone penetration rate had breached 148.5 per cent while household broadband penetration stood at 70.2 per cent at end of 2014.

She added that this was supported by the achievement of 27.8 per cent of 4G LTE service population coverage which surpassed the 20 per cent target for 2014.

"Connectivity has expanded pervasively in terms of fixed, mobile, and online, including digital broadcasting.

"We need to make sure that our networks can cope with the trend of delivering content and fulfilling e-transactions," she said.

Laila said according to the report, the High Speed Broadband (HSBB) project has recorded a double digit growth at 21 per cent to 810,000 subscriptions from 670,000 subscriptions in 2013.

Meanwhile, mobile broadband remains the largest contributor of broadband subscriptions in 2014, with more than 85 per cent of total broadband subscription (20.7 million).

"Concurrently, there is a paradigm shift in viewing trends from traditional television to online and social networking platforms. In 2014, the growth of data services was between 25 per cent and 40 per cent.

"This shows that the investment in continuous roll-out of 4G LTE and increasing throughout over our broadband infrastructure supports data demand growth," she said.

As a result, she said broadband network capacity would be driven significantly by intense usage including mobile video, which is expected to grow as much as 45 per cent annually through to 2020.

Laila said at this juncture, it was critical for Malaysia to reinforce the fundamentals in creative content production to capitalise on growing demand for such content over seamless online and mobile platforms.

"Today, games, data analytics, online TV, connected health, transport and other functionalities supported by applications or Internet connectivity are emerging trends in our increasing Malaysian digital lifestyle," she said.

Similarly, she said the rise of social media platforms including mobile application offers opportunity for e-commerce and online shopping to grow.

"This enables the postal and courier services to complement this emerging environment by offering logistics and products delivery. With that, postal services recorded a revenue growth of 12.6 per cent to RM1.52 billion from RM1.35 billion," she said.

Laila said the communications and multimedia (C&M) industry performance was stable with overall revenue growth of three per cent in 2014 to RM58.91 billion and contributed to 12.6 per cent of the Bursa Malaysia market capitalisation of RM1,651.17 billion.

She added the telecommunications and broadcasting sectors contributed 78 per cent and 10.5 per cent respectively to the total C&M industry revenue.