Competitive Priorities in Malaysian Service Industry

Abstract

Despite their significant importance, competitive priorities in the developing world have hardly been studied. Whatever attention has been devoted to competitive priorities has been given with reference to the manufacturing industry. Malaysian service industry stands no exception to this. Once a slowly-growing economy, Malaysia in the last few decades has grown consistently and is now one of the "tiger economies'' with impressive growth rate. This growth rate is noticeable both in the manufacturing and services sectors. The services sector represents about 50 percent of the GDP of Malaysia. However, there is hardly a study about competitive priorities of service industries in Malaysia that too despite the important role of service industry in Malaysian economy. Knowing about the Malaysian service industry and the competitive priorities of different industries within it is thus interesting. There is a big gap in the present literature with regard to service industry in Malaysia and it is a big shortcoming given the economic stature of Malaysia in the South-east Asian region. To fill this void in the literature, this study makes a modest attempt to: a. explain the components of competitive priorities of Malaysian service firms; b. find out the competitive priorities of different service industries in Malaysia; and c. find out how competitive priorities change across "low performance'' and "high performance'' service industries. This paper reports findings based on the data collected from nine diverse service industries in Malaysia: Fast food, Hospital, Retails store, Bank, Private college, Accountant, Hotel, Auto-repair and Architect. Such diverse industries have been surveyed to get a holistic picture of the Malaysian service industry and achieve some degree of cross-industry perspective.

Keywords: competitive priorities

JEL Classification: M54