Coronavirus drives Southeast Asia digitalisation push, raising jobs fears

Businesses across the region have been forced to rethink their operations and find new ways to reach out to customers amid pandemic lockdowns

Governments have also offered funds to help with firms’ digital transformation, sparking warnings that some jobs might ‘simply disappear’

Reading Time:4 minutes

Shoppers use hand sanitiser as a stallholder checks a customer’s temperature outside a store during a partial lockdown in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, last month. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 11:08am, 10 Jun 2020Updated: 3:06pm, 10 Jun 2020

Third-generation greengrocer Al Hafiz Abdul Rashid was struggling to keep his business afloat after Malaysia entered a period of partial coronavirus lockdown in March. With shops shut and residents staying at home, sales had slowed significantly – giving him the idea of bringing his business online.

“At first, I thought why not? You don’t hear of market vendors using an app to sell their fresh produce,” said Al Hafiz, whose family has sold vegetables, traditional spices and other goods at the popular Taman Tun wet market in Kuala Lumpur for some 20 years.

After signing up to an initiative from ride-hailing app Grab designed to help market vendors in Malaysia and Indonesia sell goods online, Al Hafiz said he has received 10 times the number of orders he did before the pandemic – with as many as 40 orders placed in one particularly busy 15-minute period.

Businesses across Southeast Asia have been forced to rethink their operations and find new ways to reach out to customers as antivirus restrictions are slowly eased across the region and residents adapt to what governments are calling the “new normal”.

A worker wearing a protective mask checks a customer’s temperature at an entrance to a grocery store in Kuala Lumpur last month. Photo: Bloomberg

This shift to doing business online is reflected in a survey by management consultancy McKinsey & Company which found in April that 58 per cent of shoppers in Malaysia and 74 per cent of those in Vietnam now opted to do their grocery shopping online.

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