CEO: Find Opportunities in Times of Crisis

Port of Spain: Going against the grain and finding opportunities in a crisis sitaution are important criteria towards establishing a successful business, Malaysian businessman Datuk Vijay Eswaran told the Commonwealth Business Forum.

The Executive Chairman and CEO of the QJ Group of Companies said a look at the Fortune 500 companies showed that almost half of them began after the first and second World Wars - formed in the midst of destruction and in the midst of havoc and chaos.

He said the real challenge in running a business was that in every opportunity, one has to undergo a crisis.

"So even in innovation there has to be challenges and a price that has to be paid for the process. The first thing we have to learn, is to go against the grain."

"We have been coached, and structured, and our thinking and parameters have been driven into granite, so to speak. Innovation begins in looking in the other way."

The Star, Nation, pg 4.

Malaysia issues China's ICBC local banking licence

Malaysia's finance ministry has issued a commercial banking licence to China's largest bank, the country's central bank announced Friday.

The licence for the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited (ICBC) follows the signing of an arrangement between the China Banking regulatory Commission and Bank Negara agreed to in the early part of the year, it said in a statement.

The issuance of the licence comes a week after both central banks signed a deal to increase cooperation in banking supervision during a state visit to Malaysia by Chinese president Hu Jintao.

In April, Najib announced measures to liberalise the country's banking sector, allowing nine new banking and insurance licences and easing foreign ownership limits for non-commercial banks.

Malaysia has 13 locally incorporated foreign banks, including HSBC and Citibank, and three foreign Islamic banking operators. No new foreign commercial banks have won approval to operate here for more than a decade.

The banking and insurance industry represented 11 percent of Malaysia's GDP in 2008, compared with 9.2 percent in 2000, and employed 140,000 people.

Excerpts from By Agence France-Presse, Updated: 11/20/2009

http://news.malaysia.msn.com/regional/article.aspx?cp-documentid=3712955