When a Malaysian technology company has built a solid product, proven its model at home and is ready to compete in ASEAN, what separates the ones that break through from those that stall? According to Gopi Ganesalingam, MDEC’s Vice President of Enterprise Development, writing in March 2018, the answer is often not the product itself — it is the ability to tell a compelling story around it. The argument has direct implications for any Malaysian company planning its next stage of growth.
A Strong Foundation, and a Natural Ceiling
Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) was established in 1996 to support Malaysian-based technology companies operating under MSC Malaysia status. By the time Ganesalingam published his commentary (14 March 2018, also carried by New Straits Times), the number of MSC-status companies had grown to more than 2,500.
Many of those companies had become market leaders domestically. The next logical move was ASEAN. But the path there exposed a structural limitation that had little to do with technology or pricing: Malaysia’s population of roughly 30 million (as of 2018) places a natural ceiling on how far a domestic-focused growth strategy can carry a business. That constraint, Ganesalingam argued, is actually a creative pressure — it forces companies to think earlier and harder about how to stand out.
The Growth Problem: Competing on Features Has a Finite Ceiling
Most Malaysian technology companies, in Ganesalingam’s assessment, follow a familiar early-stage pattern: compete on competency, price and delivery. That approach is rational when a company is small and close to its first customers. The problem emerges at scale.
Once a company reaches a certain size and starts selling to buyers who don’t already know them — especially buyers in a different market — the features-and-benefits pitch loses its grip. Ganesalingam, drawing on experience at multinationals including Lucent, American Express and Telstra, observed that deals are regularly lost not because the product is wrong but because the story lacks structure and fails to communicate what makes the company distinctly relevant.
Looking at a sample of successful Malaysian technology companies active at the time — including iPay88, Fusionex International, N2N Connect, iflix, Sedania Innovators, Les Copaque and Mindvalley — he noted that only a small number had meaningfully engaged the power of strategic storytelling as a competitive tool.
What Strategic Storytelling Actually Means
Ganesalingam’s argument is not that facts and figures are irrelevant. His point is that facts work better when they are placed inside a story that first creates emotional engagement. He references linguist Noam Chomsky’s 1960s proposition that language exists primarily for thought rather than communication — a foundation for why purely information-led pitches often fail to move a decision-maker.
The mechanism, he argues, lies in what Simon Sinek described in “The Golden Circle”: answering the why question reaches the limbic system — the part of the brain that drives emotion and memory — before rational evaluation takes over. Businesses that anchor their pitch in a clear and resonant reason for existing are opening the emotional door before the features conversation even begins.
He points to two technology figures as benchmarks. Steve Jobs is cited for the level of craft that went into every Apple product presentation — not a slide deck with narration, but a carefully constructed experience designed to speak personally to everyone in the audience before handing over to a sales and marketing follow-through. Elon Musk’s 2004 announcement of the Tesla Roadster is the second example: rather than leading with zero-emissions data, range or luggage capacity, Musk framed the car as “cool, great design and acceleration.” Tesla’s Model S subsequently became the best-selling electric vehicle in the United States in both 2016 and 2017, according to Ganesalingam’s account.
In the ASEAN context, he points to AirAsia’s tagline — “Now Anyone Can Fly” — as a local example of a story that did the work before any route map or price chart appeared. GoJek’s founder Nadiem Makarim is cited as another regional practitioner who used narrative to carry a logistics and payments platform beyond its home market in Indonesia. (These are characterised as company claims and editorial examples in the original source, not independently audited assessments.)
The Structural Response: MDEC’s GAIN Programme
To support MSC-status companies in making the move to regional and global markets, MDEC launched what the article refers to as the GAIN — Global Accelerator and Innovation Acceleration — programme. The article does not provide further detail on GAIN’s structure, eligibility criteria, funding or timeline beyond this reference. Readers seeking current programme details should consult MDEC directly, as this source dates from March 2018.
The programme was framed as a mechanism to crystallise the expansion efforts of companies that MDEC viewed as having the potential to become ASEAN market leaders — and eventually global icons.
The Result of Getting the Story Wrong
Ganesalingam is direct about the consequence for companies that cannot develop this capability. In an increasingly connected and competitive environment — where ASEAN markets are becoming progressively open — companies that remain locked in a features war will find it structurally difficult to survive. The challenge is not just competing with regional players: Malaysian SMEs and technology companies face the same global platforms and brands as any other market.
The commercial logic is straightforward. A company can win a features argument in front of a prospect who already knows it. It cannot win that argument at a distance, or against a competitor whose narrative is already embedded in the buyer’s mind. Strategic storytelling is, in this framing, a scalability problem as much as a marketing one.
What the Argument Points Toward
The case Ganesalingam made in 2018 has not diminished in relevance. The ASEAN digital economy has continued to grow, competition for attention across regional markets has intensified, and the question of how a Malaysian company distinguishes itself — not just on product merit but on the story it tells about why it exists — remains an active growth challenge for companies at every stage.
For Malaysian businesses mapping their next expansion, the practical implication is clear: the transition from domestic market leader to regional competitor is rarely blocked by product quality alone. The companies worth watching will be those that invest in building a narrative architecture — a clear, emotionally grounded story about what they do and why it matters — before they walk into a new market, not after.
Source: Gopi Ganesalingam, Vice President of Enterprise Development, MDEC. Opinion published 14 March 2018 on the MDEC blog and in New Straits Times. Figures, examples and characterisations reflect the author’s views at the time of publication and are attributed accordingly.
