PETALING JAYA: The National ICT Association of Malaysia (Pikom) is confident that the sales of IT-related products and services will pick up after the zero-rated Goods and Services Tax (GST), said chairman Ganesh Kumar Bangah.
“We expect to see pick up in sales after zero-rated GST. However, it is still too early to see the impact.
“We will be able to see the trend in the next two to three months. Nevertheless, we welcomed this move by the government,” Ganesh told NST Business in an interview recently.
Since the implementation of GST, the association has been supportive towards removing all IT products and services as as a means to help the rakyat.
“Today, these are necessities that everyone uses and providing some form of subsidy or relief would go a long way to help the man on the street,” Pikom’s former chairman Chin Chee Seong was quoted as saying in a statement in 2016.
Previously, all IT products and services were expempted from Sales and Services Tax (SST).
“We hope the government will maintain the zero-rated SST for IT products and services, and we are confident that this is going to create more momentum of growth and demand,” he said.
Meanwhile, with Pikom’s fate was still in limbo after the change in government, Ganesh said it remained steadfast in its vision to help make Malaysia becomes the technology capital of Southeast Asia.
He said as a lot of technology driven initiatives were initiated during Tun Mahathir Mohamad’s time when he was the fourth Prime Minister, such as the multimedia super corridor (MSC), the association believes that the current government will continue to have that focus now.
“As an industry association, Pikom always supports the government of the day. We have the responsibility to our members to make sure that, over the next seven years, our local players will be able to ride on the region’s projected growth of internet economy from US$50 billion to US$250 billion in the next seven years.
“The previous government has a strong focus on the digital economy and I also believe the current government continue to have that focus as well,” he added.
