“Malaysia's Lockdown: Retail Apocalypse or Opportunity?” with Darren Chin | Episode 5

Darren Chin, Country Head of Malaysia from Aimazing, shares with Jun and Imran on The Future of Retail Asia about the happenings in Malaysia, how the retail situation in the country is developing, and what malls and retailers are doing to adapt to the pandemic. He taps on his prior experience of working with Point-of-Sales systems and online marketing to capitalise on data to move the whole retail industry forward.

The Future of Retail Asia, now streaming on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts. View the video and full transcript below. Enjoy!

Episode 5: “Malaysia's Lockdown: Retail Apocalypse or Opportunity?” with Darren Chin

-- Start Transcript --

IMRAN: Welcome back to the Future of Retail Asia! My name is Imran.

JUN: And I’m Jun. Today we have a slighty more special episode. We’ve had some buzz among our viewers about the Malaysia Market, especially hearing about the daily news. We hear you! Today, we’re chatting with our Country Head of Malaysia, Darren Chin!

IMRAN: A little bit more about Darren, he started off in marketing and sales from 2006, and founded his own SEO and social media marketing firm in 2010 and 2011 where he manages clients like Indosat and Telkomsel! He later found his way into the retail industry by joining StoreHub Malaysia in their Business Development and Partnerships division, and now he has been here with us at Aimazing for almost 2 years now. Working with the mall management and retailers in Malaysia. So welcome again Darren!

DARREN: Thanks for having me, Imran and Jun.

JUN: First question, from your time doing online marketing and sales, to your time at StoreHub, serving F&B outlets and retailers with their POS system, what did you see at your time with StoreHub that made you want to be part of this retail industry?

DARREN: Thanks Jun. If you look at the data from the Malaysia statistics department, almost 99% of businesses in Malaysia are SMEs, cut across all sizes & sectors and the retail industry and F&Bs are contributing to more than 45% of the economy in Malaysia. In other words, it's the main source of income for the Micro-SME or SME business owners which means it's the heart of Malaysia. In the good old days, the point of sales technology was actually built for large corporations and it’s very, very expensive. And for the longest time now, SME is using this same technology to scale their business and automate processes. When I was in the point of sales scene, I noticed that not only solving day to day operations is important but data is the key to scale and in order to scale, businesses needed to make more informed decisions. Not all POS systems are intuitive. Business owners would need to change the whole entire system and operational routine just to have that new system. Let alone the replacement of costing. During the UOB FINLAB event, that’s the first time I saw Jun presenting AImazing’s technology. When I saw that it is so seamless where there’s no need to change the whole system hence no need to change operation routine, there’s no need to have capex involved , no need for integration. I figured that’s the only thing that SME retailers need to harness full data from their business to scale. Coming from the past experience on SME market and now working very closely with the shopping mall, I strongly believe that malls are in the right position to empower SME businesses to survive and thrive in this tryin