CIMB foresees 5.2% growth in 2018
KOTA KINABALU: CIMB foresees growth slowing from 5.9 percent in 2017 to 5.2 percent in 2018.
The CIMB Group’s Group Commercial Banking Chief Executive Officer, Effendy Shahul Hamid said to reporters that the exceptionally strong trade cycle, driven by commodities, E&E and manufacturing in 2017 was also expected to be moderate in 2018.
Nevertheless, they would remain supportive of economic expansion, he told reporters attending the CIMB SME Business Forum, Sabah Media Briefing held at a resort near here yesterday.
Similarly, private consumption would also remain resilient, as gains trickle via a tighter labour markets and wage growth, he said.
And investments would continue to be supported by infrastructure spending but also increasingly, capital expenditure by the private sector amid rising capacity utilization, he said.
“We expect inflation to moderate to 2.9 percent in 2018 from 3.8 percent in 2017, and the Overnight Policy Rate (OPR) to hold at 3.25 percent in 2018, though higher than expected inflation could prompt an OPR hike in 2018,” he said.
He also said that the Malaysian Ringgit is likely to average RM3.91/US$ in 2018 and weaken modestly to 4.0 in 2019.
During his briefing, Effendy also said that out of the 907,065 Small and Medium Enterprises in the country, about 6.2 percent were from Sabah and 6.7 percent were from Sarawak, followed by 0.3 percent from the Labuan Federal Territory.
Reporters were made aware that SMEs were the backbone fo the Malaysian economy and that 98.5 percent of business establishments in the country were SMEs and that 20.7 percent of the SMEs were women-owned.
Most of the SMEs in the country falls under the services sector at 89.2 percent (809,126 SMEs), manufacturing sector (5.3 percent or 47,698 SMEs), construction sector (4.3 percent or 39,158 SMEs), agriculture sector (1.1 percent or 10,218 SMEs) and mining and quarrying (0.1 percent or 865 SMEs).
He also said that the CIMB Bank had been ranked the top three in the SME space with Yearon-Year double digit growth, and that the sectors in focus include palm oil cultivation, wholesale, trading, particularly in Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) and tourism related industries in East Malaysia.
He added that to support the growing financial needs locally, CIMB has a wide presence on the ground in East Malaysia, which includes three commercial banking centres in East Malaysia (Kota Kinabalu, Kuching and Miri); satellite commercial desks in Sandakan, Tawau, Sibu and Bintulu and 13 branches with dedicated SME relationship managers for smaller SMEs; eight deposit relationship managers in East Malaysia to support the cash management and online banking for SMEs.