Sarawak’s business events performance for FY2022 surpassed targets on both economic and legacy impact returns.
With face-to-face meetings back in full swing, Sarawak hosted 100 business events in FY2022, which had RM230.3 million (US$49.5 million) in total economic impact. Direct delegate expenditures injected another RM125.1 million into the economy while 18,275 short- and long-term jobs were created within the last 12 months.
For secured events in FY2022, the legacy performance recorded an 82 per cent success rate with 91 out of 100 secured events planning to drive benefits to sectors, trade and investment, communities, the environment and governance. A total of 485 impacts were identified with the highest in the services, tourism, agriculture, education & human capital, and innovation categories.
Sarawak also secured 100 future business events with a projected total economic impact of RM325.3 million, which would bring about a direct delegate expenditure of RM177.3 million and tax revenue of RM19.6 million. The local community will also benefit from these events, with an additional 25,896 jobs to come online. The secured events target exceeded 111 per cent, while other economic returns exceeded 196 per cent.
Furthermore, Sarawak has been successful in international bidding, securing 100 per cent of all bids. These will come with a projected total economic impact of RM179.4 million and over 14,000 job opportunities on the horizon, making FY2022 the most successful bidding year in the last two years.
FY2022 marked the business events industry’s third year in executing the Post Covid-19 Development Strategy (PCDS) 2030. One of the industry’s objectives is to align with the PCDS 2030 by focusing on securing sustainable, legacy-driven business events from the six priority economic sectors and seven enabler sectors. The six priority sectors are manufacturing, agriculture, tourism, forestry, mining and services) and the seven enabler sectors are digital transformation, innovation, education & human capital, basic infrastructure, utilities, transport and renewable energy).
BESarawak’s chairman, Abang Abdul Karim Abang Openg, said in a press release: “We stayed on track in securing events of key interests aligned with the Sarawak Government’s objectives of stimulating economic and social growth, while growing our core business, optimising costs and opportunities and strengthening Sarawak’s stakeholder collaborations and talent pool to boost industry competence. Through business events, Sarawak is laying the foundation for sustainable development with the intention of leaving a transformative impact on local communities for years to come.”
Prior to that, she was general manager at the Cabochon Hotel & Residence in Bangkok.
Fluent in English, French and Italian, he also has extensive global management experience with large multinational organisations.
The main arena spans 3,306m2 and can accommodate about 8,400 people, while the sub arena takes about 450 people. Both are suitable for academic conferences, trade fairs, exhibitions, and other large-scale events like sports and concerts.
The German national has over 25 years of experience with IHG Hotels & Resorts across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, and brings extensive knowledge and expertise to his new role.
Following its release in April 2023, Interprefy Aivia, an artificial intelligence-powered (AI) Real-time Simultaneous Interpretation solution, was recently deployed at the AI for Good Global Summit, providing human attendees with live captioning and speech translation.
The event was organised by the International Telecommunication Union, the UN’s specialised agency for information and communication technology.
Interprefy Aivia is a creation of multilingual meeting technology and services provider Interprefy. It can translate live speech from 45 languages and regional dialects into AI-generated audio and captions in 73 languages. This includes all official UN languages, almost all official EU languages, and the most spoken Asian languages.
Oddmund Braaten, CEO at Interprefy, said: “While the use of AI is advancing at a fast rate, it is still no substitute for professional interpreters in certain scenarios – especially in diplomatic conversations. A skilled linguist often outperforms AI as they are able to read the audience and provide nuanced localisation to accommodate sarcasm, humour, or idioms. But as demonstrated at the AI for Good summit, AI is becoming an extremely helpful tool to help make the conferencing world more inclusive, and make conversations accessible to participants from all over the world.”
Interprefy Aivia completes Interprefy’s end-to-end remote simultaneous and sign language interpretation offering by providing a cost-effective AI-powered real-time translation solution for scenarios like webinars, training, town halls, or conferences.