Dissecting Socio-demographics Profile of Malaysian Agribusiness Small-Medium Enterprise (ASME) Owners

Arumugam, Nalini and Dhayalan, Alageasan and Fakhrul Anwar, Zainol and Boniface, Bonaventure (2019) Dissecting Socio-demographics Profile of Malaysian Agribusiness Small-Medium Enterprise (ASME) Owners. In: Second International Conference on the Future of ASEAN (ICoFA) 2017, 15 August 2017, UiTM Perlis.

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Abstract

Small businesses are beneficial for local economic prosperity as they contribute to the nation's financial gain and create job opportunities.At present, the Malaysian government aims to facilitate the growth of small businesses through innovation and productivity as a measure to become a high-income nation by 2020. However, agriculture sector-specific business data is still in scarce.Thus,this paper aims to provide the sociodemographic profile of Malaysian ASME owners as a measure to demonstrate the preparedness of small business owners,especially in the agribusiness sector to accept and practice changes promoted by authorities. Structured interviews were conducted with the aid of closed-ended questionnares with 297 respondents conveniently sampled from six different states: Terengganu,Perak, Selangor,Johor,Sabah and Sarawak.As a result,microscale businesses were found to dominate the business count for Malaysian ASMEs.Apart from that, 57.1% of businesses are conducting marketing as the core business activity. Processed food was found to be the most popular sub-sector ventured by Malaysian ASMEs owners, involving 41.6% of respondents. A gender imbalance of 16.2% was found in terms of participation with more male than female ASME owners. In terms of age, the participation of youth is 52.0%.However,only 32.6% of business owners had attained tertiary education. Most of the respondents (72.5) are married. In addition, 61.5% of ASMEs owners are having between one and five dependents.

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