Q&A: Transparency in govt procurement vital to US investors, says envoy

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United States ambassador to Malaysia Christopher J LaFleur talks about the challenges confronting the Malaysian economy and the areas which investors would like to see improvement in this final of a two-part interview with malaysiakini .

Malaysiakini: There's concern that US foreign direct investment (FDI) in Malaysia has dropped. Some argue that China is gobbling up all the FDI. What's your view on this?

LaFleur: The first question to ask in response to your question is: is it in fact dropping? I'm not sure I've seen statistics that would support that. In fact, I think what we're seeing is that the US companies that have already invested in Malaysia - depending on how you count, we have perhaps US$29 billion invested here. We're seeing those companies continue to make investments here.

Just reading this morning, I saw in one of the newspapers, that Motorola is doing some additional investments in their facilities. I'm not sure you're seeing a drop or disinvestment, if that's what you mean. I think the question relates more to what Malaysia is doing or could do to bring in brand new sorts of investments, sometimes termed 'greenfield' investments, something that hasn't been done before.

A couple of thoughts on that: first, you've got a pretty impressive array of companies here so the universe of companies that might be investing in Malaysia may not be quite as large because you've already gotten quite a number of them here to begin with.

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