Tuesday, 15 March 2016

Study: Almost 30 per cent of 'super wealthy' Malaysians considering migrating abroad

Study: Almost 30 per cent of 'super wealthy' Malaysians considering migrating abroad




KUALA LUMPUR: Approximately 26 per cent of Malaysia's existing ultra-high-net-worth-individuals (UHNWIs) are considering migrating in the next decade, in comparison to the regional average of 16 per cent, according to independent global property consultancy, Knight Frank. 

"This is particularly interesting given that we do a study of the region, and Malaysia's UHNWIs shows the highest propensity to find other domiciles," said its Asia Pacific Head of Research, Nicholas Holt. 

Knight Frank Malaysia managing director, Sarkunan Subramaniam said that there multiple push and pull factors contributing to this. 

"This desire to domicile elsewhere is not unique given that Malaysians are becoming more international. 

In fact 26 per cent versus the regional 16 per cent is not that significant, when you look at the grander scope of things." 

The firm had earlier shared that Malaysia's UHNWIs, which is defined as those who have US$30 million of investable assets, excluding their current residential, had been impacted hard by the challenging economic climate brought upon by the fall in global oil price and ringgit devaluation. 

"Malaysia has a 1,168 of UHNWIs in 2014, but that number dropped to 993 by end of 2015," said Holt. 

Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi had yesterday said that a total of 54,406 Malaysians have renounced their citizenship from 2010 until Jan 31 this year. 

“The reason given for their surrender (of citizenship) is because they have chosen not to retain their Malaysian citizenship, and have obtained citizenship in other countries,” said Zahid in a parliamentary session yesterday. 

In January this year alone, 1,102 Malaysians had renounced their citizenship. 

A total of 11,080 Malaysians had renounced their citizenship in 2011, while another 10,644 chose not to retain their citizenship the year before. 

Since then, the number of Malaysians renouncing their citizenship has reduced. Zahid said 8,983 people gave up their Malaysian citizenship in 2012, followed by 6,678 in 2013, 7,843 in 2014 and 8,076 last year.

----- The New Straits Times ( Malaysia )     15 March 2016

Friday, 11 March 2016

Using failure to your advantage

Using failure to your advantage
One of the biggest roadblocks to success is the fear of failure. Fear of failure is worse than failure itself because it condemns you to a life of unrealised potential.
A successful response to failure is all in the approach. In a study recently published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers found that success in the face of failure comes from focusing on results (what you hope to achieve), rather than trying not to fail.
While it’s tempting to try and avoid failure, people who do this fail far more often than those who optimistically focus on their goals.
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” ­­­—Winston Churchill
This sounds rather easy and intuitive, but it’s very hard to do when the consequences of failure are severe. Researchers also found that positive feedback increased people’s chances of success because it fuelled the same optimism you experienced when focusing solely on your goals.
Attitude is key
The people who make history—true innovators—take things a step further and see failure as a mere stepping stone to success.
Thomas Edison is a great example. It took him 1,000 tries to develop a light bulb that actually worked. When someone asked him how it felt to fail 1,000 times, he said, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”
This attitude is what separates the successes from the failures. Edison wasn’t the only one. J. K. Rowling’s manuscript for Harry Potter was only accepted after 12 publishers denied it, and even then, she was only paid a nominal advance.
Oprah Winfrey lost her job as a Baltimore news anchor for becoming too emotionally involved in her stories, a quality that became her trademark. Henry Ford lost his financial backers twice before he was able to produce a workable prototype of an automobile. The list goes on and on.
“If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.” —Henry Ford
So, what separates the people who let their failures derail them from those who use failure to their advantage? Some of it comes down to what you do, and the rest comes down to what you think.
The actions you take in the face of failure are critical to your ability to recover from it, and they have huge implications for how others view you and your mistakes.
There are five actions you must take when you fail. This will enable you to succeed in the future and allow others to see you positively in spite of your failure.
1 Break the bad news yourself
If you’ve made a mistake, don’t cross your fingers and hope that no one will notice, because someone is going to—it’s inevitable.
When someone else points out your failure, that one failure turns into two. If you stay quiet, people are going to wonder why you didn’t say something, and they’re likely to attribute this to either cowardice or ignorance.
2 Offer an explanation, but don’t make excuses
Owning your mistakes can actually enhance your image. It shows confidence, accountability, and integrity. Just be sure to stick to the facts.
“We lost the account because I missed the deadline” is a reason. “We lost the account because my dog was sick all weekend and that made me miss the deadline” is an excuse.
3 Have a plan for fixing things
Owning up to a mistake is one thing, but you can’t end it there. What you do next is critical. Instead of standing there, waiting for someone else to clean up your mess, offer your own solutions.
It’s even better if you can tell your boss (or whomever) the specific steps that you’ve already taken to get things back on track.
4 Have a plan for prevention
In addition to having a plan for fixing things, you should also have a plan for how you’ll avoid making the same mistakes in the future. That’s the best way to reassure people that good things will come out of your failure.
5 Get back on the horse
It’s important that you don’t let failure make you timid. That’s a mindset that sucks you in and handicaps you every time you slip up.
Make enough time to absorb the lessons of your failure, and as soon as you’ve done that, get right back out there and try again. Waiting only prolongs bad feelings and increases the chance that you’ll lose your nerve.
Your attitude when facing failure is just as important as the actions you take. Using failure to your advantage requires resilience and mental strength, both of which are hallmarks of emotional intelligence.
When you fail, there are three attitudes you want to maintain:
Perspective
It is the most important factor in handling failure. People who are skilled at rebounding after failure are more likely to blame the failure on something that they did—the wrong course of action or a specific oversight—rather than something that they are.
People who are bad at handling failure tend to blame failure on their laziness, lack of intelligence, or some other personal quality, which implies that they had no control over the situation. That makes them more likely to avoid future risk-taking.
Optimism
It is another characteristic of people who bounce back from failure. One British study of 576 serial entrepreneurs found that they were much more likely to expect success than entrepreneurs who gave up after their first failure.
That sense of optimism is what keeps people from feeling like failure is a permanent condition. Instead, they tend to see each failure as a building block to their ultimate success because of the learning it provides.
Persistence
Optimism is a feeling of positivity; persistence is what you do with it. Persistence is thus, optimism in action. When everybody else says “enough is enough” and decides to quit and go home, persistent people shake off those failures and keep going.
Persistent people are special because their optimism never dies. This makes them great at rising from failure.
Bringing it all together
Failure is a product of your perspective. What one person considers as a crushing defeat, another sees as a minor setback. The beauty is that you can change how you see failure so that you can use it to better yourself.
How do you handle failure?
Dr Travis Bradberry is an award-winning co-author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and co-founder of the world’s leading provider of emotional intelligence tests and training. His bestselling books have been translated into 25 languages and are available in more than 150 countries. To learn how to work with emotional intelligence in your organisation, write in to training@leaderonomics.com.
27  February  2016

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Monday, 7 March 2016

Email inventor Ray Tomlinson dies at 74

Email inventor Ray Tomlinson dies at 74


US programmer Ray Tomlinson , pictured on October 22, 2009 invented the user@host standard for email addresses
RAY Tomlinson, the American programmer widely credited with inventing email, has died. He was 74.
Before Tomlinson invented direct electronic messages between users on different machines on a certain network in 1971. Before then, users could only write messages to others using the same computer.
"A true technology pioneer, Ray was the man who brought us email in the early days of networked computers," his employer, Raytheon, said in a statement.
"His work changed the way the world communicates and yet, for all his accomplishments, he remained humble, kind and generous with his time and talents, He will be missed by one and all."
A company spokesman said Tomlinson passed away on Saturday, and the cause of death was not yet confirmed.
Tributes poured in from the online world.
"Thank you, Ray Tomlinson, for inventing email and putting the @ sign on the map. #RIP," Google's Gmail team tweeted.
Vint Cerf, considered one of the fathers of the Internet who was once a manager of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), lamented the "very sad news" of Tomlinson's passing.
When Tomlinson invented the user@host standard for email addresses, it was applied at Darpa's ARPANET, the Internet's precursor. He was the first to use the @ symbol in this way, to distinguish a user from its host.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate detailed his creation on his blog, in an attempt to prevent legend from overtaking the facts.
"The first message was sent between two machines that were literally side by side" connected only through ARPANET, he wrote on his blog.
" I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other. The test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them.
"Most likely the first message was QWERTYUIOP or something similar," he added, referring to the first letters on the traditional English-language keyboard.
"When I was satisfied that the program seemed to work, I sent a message to the rest of my group explaining how to send messages over the network. The first use of network email announced its own existence." 
– AFP   7 March 2016

Friday, 4 March 2016

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South Korea and S’pore nab top spot in world’s best airport ranking

South Korea and S’pore nab top spot in world’s best airport ranking

March 4, 2016
Asia can claim bragging rights to being home to the world's best airports, with South Korea, Singapore, and China taking the top three spots in a new airport ranking.
airportResults of the 2015 Airport Service Quality Awards suggest that flyers passing through the major hubs in Asia are more likely to be satisfied with their airport experience than other parts of the world.
In the category of airports with more than 40 million passengers, Korea’s Incheon Airport and Singapore Changi tied for first place; Shanghai Pudong and Beijing tied for second; and Guangzhou Baiyun placed third.
Flyers were asked to rate airports in categories such as access, check-in, security, facilities, food and beverage and dining.
The Airport Service Quality awards is organized by the Airports Council International — and is hardly the only one of its kind.
Lists ranking the world’s best airports are also released by groups like Skytrax and Sleeping in Airports, which compile the results based on surveys.
The ASQ awards, however, is touted as the only global airport survey that polls passengers while they’re at the airport. For the 2015 edition of the awards, about 500,000 passengers were interviewed prior to boarding their flight at over 300 airports in 80 countries last year.
New in 2015, the results have been expanded to break down winners by size and region.
Here are some of the winners:
Best airports over 40 million passengers a year
First place (tie): Seoul Incheon; Singapore
Second place (tie): Beijing; Shanghai Pudong
Third place: Guangzhou Baiyun
Best Airport by Region (over 2 million passengers per year):
North America
First place: Indianapolis
Second place (tie): Dallas Love Field; Grand Rapids; Jacksonville; Ottawa; Tampa
Third place (tie): Austin; Detroit; Sacramento; San Antonio; Toronto Billy Bishop
Africa
First place: Mauritius
Second place (tie): Cape Town; Durban
Third place: Johannesburg
Asia-Pacific
First place (tie): Seoul Incheon; Singapore
Second place (tie): Beijing; Mumbai; New Delhi; Sanya Phoenix; Shanghai Pudong
Third place (tie): Guangzhou Baiyun; Taiwan Taoyuan; Tianjin Binhai
Europe
First place (tie): Moscow Sheremetyevo; Pulkovo; Sochi
Second place (tie): Dublin; Malta; Prague; Zurich
Third place (tie): Copenhagen; Keflavik; London Heathrow; Porto; Vienna
Middle East
First place: Amman
Second place (tie): Abu Dhabi; Doha
Third place (tie): Dammam; Dubai; Tel Aviv
Latin America-Caribbean
First place: Guayaquil
Second place: Quito
Third place: Punta Cana
– AFP Relaxnews

Consumers still prefer credit cards to paying with a smartphone

Consumers still prefer credit cards to paying with a smartphone

March 4, 2016
As Google gears up to launch its digital wallet service, Android Pay in the UK, many experts are still less than convinced that the idea of replacing a credit card with a smartphone is really going to gain mainstream consumer appeal.
phone-credit-card
According to Juniper Research, by the end of 2016, 148 million people around the world will be reaching for their handsets to make payments at in-store point of sales (POS) terminals.
In its latest white paper, “Contactless Payments: ‘NFC Handsets, Wearables & Payment Cards 2016-2020,” the research firm highlights that one-in-five POS terminals in the US now supports NFC (one of the technologies that facilitates payments by smartphones) and points to Apple as a catalyst for consumer interest in the technology. When Apple Pay went live in China in February, 40 million cards were added to the system in just 24 hours.
However, registering cards and using them via a handset are not the same thing.
Apple Pay has been live in the US for 18 months and Samsung Pay and Android Pay for a little over six months. Yet, according to research from Crone Consulting, just 12 million consumers regularly use Apple’s mobile payment system while 5 million use either Samsung Pay or Android Pay.
This means that so far, just 22 million Americans have made the switch from physical to virtual wallets.
And this is despite the fact that Samsung Pay has a distinct advantage over other systems, as it works with any type of POS terminal, new or old. Or the fact that the systems, although competitors, all have one thing in common — they’re mores secure than traditional magnetic swipe credit cards.
On Tuesday, Samsung announced that Wells Fargo Bank had become the latest financial institution to support its mobile payments technology. That means that 70% of America’s credit and debit card market is Samsung Pay compatible.
In Europe, where all three companies are now turning their attention, NFC credit and debit cards are already popular, allowing consumers to tap to pay for small purchases, and existing cards are much more secure, requiring a type-in PIN number for larger transactions.
Therefore, how UK consumers — considered the most tech savvy in mature markets — embrace the technology will highlight if the services are the shape of the future or simply a fad.
– AFP Relaxnews

Wednesday, 2 March 2016

Manulife: M’sians most indebted in Asia

Manulife: M’sians most indebted in Asia

March 3, 2016
Survey shows 68 per cent of Malaysians have debt, highest amongst eight countries in Asia.
DebtKUALA LUMPUR: A recent survey by Manulife shows that 68 per cent of Malaysians currently have debt, the highest proportion of all eight markets surveyed in Asia, and more than double the regional average of 33 per cent.
The survey, the Manulife Investor Sentiment Index, was based on 500 interviews in Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia.
In a statement, Manulife said the average debt for Malaysians was RM56,000, nearly 10 times the average monthly personal income, mostly due to daily living expenses (60 per cent), with rental payments (44 per cent) and children’s education (37 per cent).
“Worryingly, much of the debt is long-term, with a quarter of those in debt not expecting to be able to pay it off for three years or more.
“The high debt levels reflect poor financial management, with investors failing to effectively manage their cash flow,” it said.
While 89 per cent of the surveyed Malaysian respondents track their expenses regularly, 44 per cent of investors spend 70 per cent or more of their monthly income every month, suggesting they are not acting on their tracking by curbing expenses.
Manulife Holdings Bhd Group Chief Executive Officer Mark O’ Dell said investors need to better manage their finances and track expenses to prevent them from incurring too much debt, especially considering the backdrop of more volatile financial markets and slowing economic growth.
“Without effective debt management, Malaysians are less likely to achieve their long term savings goals, which could jeopardise their future financial security,” he added.
– BERNAMA