It is laudable that the Securities Commission Malaysia (SC) has acted swiftly against a promoter of an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in the larger public interest recently. This follows a noticeable upswing in activities by new ICOs to solicit investments in cryptocurrencies from the Malaysian public.

On Jan 9, the SC directed Singapore-registered CopyCash Foundation to immediately cease and desist all its proposed activities, including a plan to launch an ICO on Jan 10, in Malaysia.

The directive was issued by the SC following its inquiry after finding there is a reasonable likelihood that disclosures in CopyCash Foundation’s white paper and representations to potential investors will contravene relevant requirements under securities laws.

The SC noted the ICO operator had organised talks and seminars in major cities, including Penang and Kuala Lumpur. The regulator had earlier said it was calling in key officers of the foundation to inquire into its activities.

However, CopyCash Foundation is not the first such ICO to be introduced in the country and certainly won’t be the last. Ecobit and HelloGold are among the ICOs which had grabbed interest among the local investing community.

The SC has reminded the public to seek legal or professional advice if they are in doubt about the applicable legal and regulatory requirements pertaining to such ICOs. It has also warned investors to be mindful of the potential risks involved in ICOs and investment arrangements involving digital tokens.

Given the complexity of such schemes to the laymen, especially mom-and-pop investors and senior citizens, the SC’s warning and directive against CopyCash Foundation are timely.

It will invariably require much legwork but investors need to understand such digital offerings and find out more about the underlying projects, business and assets of the operator and the schemes.

Given that ICOs operate online and are usually not regulated, investors should be wary of being exposed to heightened risks of fraud. On the other hand, financial regulators like the SC, Bank Negara Malaysia and other enforcement agencies need to be constantly vigilant and closely monitor such ICO-related activities and take action where necessary.

The regulators also need to come up with the necessary policies, guidelines and regulatory framework to govern legitimate ICOs and the use of cryptocurrencies.

With more retrenchments looming as we start 2018, the spotlight is on the Social Security Organisation (Socso) and government to provide relief and support to those who have lost their jobs.

The latest news of AmBank Bhd’s mutual separation scheme (MSS), which aims to reduce the workforce by 1,200 to 1,500 employees, is another worrying sign. The Malaysian Employers Federation, on Jan 3, further painted a gloomy outlook saying as many as 50,000 Malaysians could be staring at a potential job loss this year.

What a way to start the new year! The Ministry of International Trade and Industry says most of those laid off will be re-employed in other sectors. But will this help all affected workers?

Socso currently provides short-term payment of RM600 per month for a maximum of three months to genuine cases of retrenchment under the Employment Insurance Scheme (EIS) implemented this month. Seriously, is RM600 per month the best that Socso and the government can do?

Let’s be real – RM600 can hardly cover the rental for a house in the Klang Valley. Can’t the government do more?

Socso can certainly do more as its chairman Tan Sri Dr Aseh Che Mat was reported as saying the organisation is estimating a collection of RM479.5 mil from the EIS this year, from 430,000 employers and 6.6 million workers.

The country’s unemployment rate is the lowest in the region at 3.3%. Still, as of September last year, 30,700 Malaysians had been retrenched. Now compare this to 37,699 and 38,499 Malaysians who lost their jobs in 2016 and 2015, respectively.

These figures are deeply troubling. If indeed the economy is slowly regaining strength, why are so many Malaysians expecting to be laid off?

With the general election around the corner, the last thing Malaysians want are short-term solutions. It’s time to act fast to help those facing layoffs with a more pragmatic and realistic solution.

PLUS Malaysia Bhd, the largest highway concessionaire in the country, has revealed it spent a whopping RM1 bil in 2016 to maintain its highways.

This is not entirely surprising because operating road networks can be an expensive business. However, maintenance spending is only part of the bigger picture.

To put things in better perspective, PLUS also needs to share more details of its financials. For example, it should declare how much it generates from each highway through toll collection. Only then, compared to expenditure, will we be able to gauge whether PLUS is running its business efficiently.

The highway operator said the maintenance cost is necessary to ensure safety of road users, adding it conducts more than 10,000 inspections and asset monitoring for its highways annually, including maintaining land along them.

For its financial year 2016 (FY16), PLUS posted revenue of RM3.97 bil and net profit of RM252.68 mil. That would mean it spent about 25% of its revenue on highway maintenance alone.

According to the PLUS website, the expressways under its portfolio total 986km. They include the North-South Expressway, New Klang Valley Expressway, Federal Highway Route 2, Seremban-Port Dickson Highway, North-South Expressway Central Link, Malaysia-Singapore Second Link, Butterworth-Kulim Expressway and the Penang Bridge.

The maintenance bill for FY16 worked out to RM1 mil spent on every kilometre of highway. Is this justified? It is hard to say until PLUS reveals more details of its revenue and spending.

For example, it should also disclose the toll collection against maintenance spending ratio for each highway. The public should be informed which highway required the most maintenance work and why. Just as important is whether PLUS is getting the most cost-effective contractors to undertake its maintenance works.

When Maju Holdings Sdn Bhd made a RM36 bil bid to acquire PLUS last year, one of the reasons given for rejecting it is that the concessionaire is a strategic national asset and steady dividends from the highway operations are beneficial to members of the Employees Provident Fund (EPF), which owns 51% of PLUS.

For the same reason, PLUS should be more transparent. Taxpaying members of the EPF should be privy to a more complete financial picture of this national asset.

Tertiary education is expensive. A 2015 study by the London-based business-to-business marketplace, Expert Market, says in relation to its household income, Malaysia is the fifth most expensive country in the world to get a university education.

The study noted that while the country registered the lowest tuition fee cost among the top 10 most expensive places to study, the average domestic wage is still only RM2,052 per month.

As such, parents spend 55% of their salaries for each child to complete university. So, naturally, study loans are how most tertiary education students pay for their tuition.

A HSBC Bank study released in 2016 says that 57% of the 411 parents surveyed took loans for their offspring’s university education, despite having savings. They spend an average of RM38,000 a year on each child’s education.

While concerns over the recent US Federal government shutdown has been laid to rest, capital markets cannot discount an adverse impact stemming from a correction to Wall Street’s current bullish state.

This is in view of the correlation between global markets and asset classes that has become increasingly obvious since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis which emanated from the US subprime mortgage market and how it evolved into a full-blown international banking crisis with the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers.

“Asian markets will certainly correct correspondingly but in a lesser quantum although the fall in emerging markets can be sharper,” opined Affin Hwang Asset Management Bhd managing director Teng Chee Wai.

Teng, who presided a 2018 Market Outlook media briefing, was commenting on the record-breaking spree of Wall Street’s major indices led by the benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average index which has since surpassed the 26,000 mark.

The first time I saw oil palm trees was in 1949 when I arrived in Layang Layang in Johor at the former Guthrie estates known as Oil Palm of Malaya or OPM. My brother was a headman of harvesters who climbed the trees to hack the bunches and let them fall. I used to be left alone in the morning and on my walks, I saw the bunches loaded on to railway wagons that went to the mill. Sometimes I would also pick up a red loose fruit and put a fire to it and then eat the flesh. It had a very nice taste as the fat smeared my lips.

Since then the areas planted with palms have increased. Yet when I was an estate manager at Pamol near Kluang in 1975, the production was only 1.2 million tonnes for the whole country. We were no threat to anybody. Soya oil and other vegetable oils were much bigger. Today, however, production has exceeded 20 million tonnes, or 16 times higher. Indonesia since the 1990s has also expanded its planted area to reach a volume of over 30 million tonnes, so together our production can be over 50 million tonnes a year.

So should the competitors of palm oil be worried?

Yes, as we all know from their campaigns. Palm oil has grown to be the biggest source of vegetable oils, and its cost of production is also low when yield per hectare improves. So we can see why the competition for the market has led to accusations about palm oil.

Most products and services available in the market have suffered a series of failed attempts. There are also those that are perceived as state-of-the-art and should be well received. But somehow, they either did not pass the test of consumer acceptance or could not be scaled up.

So how does one get the product, target market and timing right? Romanian business coach and consultant for global start-up accelerator Startupbootcamp, Adrian Pica says: “Most [products introduced by start-ups] fail because they are not clear on what issue or problem they are trying to resolve.

“Some will wrongly address the problem, and others the solution whereas one should know if there is enough desire for a product.”

“Try not to jump into building products but build prototypes to assumptions. If you can’t explain it simply, you probably don’t understand it well enough.”

What he proposes is that prior to the product development stage, one should develop a simple framework that caters to a focus group.