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HSBC different races ad reflects lack of successful Malay businesses?

Click the picture to reveal the other family

I was walking around Ang Mo Kio yesterday, when I chanced upon this wall ad on HSBC’s Ang Mo Kio Branch. It’s trying to brand itself as a global local bank that knows and understands the different cultures here. But the thing that struck me was the use of generalisations in this ad. For example, on one side, there is a picture of a Chinese family who runs a jewellry shop in where else but Chinatown. It reflects a sense of upper class that seems to suggest that the Chinese are rich. Very rich. Using a jewellry shop as an exemplary Chinese business seem to mean that the Chinese could afford them.

On the other side of the pic, is another race. I’m sure a lot of people are not surprised to find a picture of an Indian family there. But the generalisation comes to a point of sheer ignorance in my opinion. Guess where this Indian family’s electronic shop is located?

Little India of course!

Wow! No prizes for correctly guessing that one. Which leaves me one question. Where are the Malays?

Maybe the ad wouldn’t look so nice with a “Chicken Rice business in Geylang”.

Malays constitute 15% of Singapore’s local population. 5 times more than the Indian community. So technically, shouldn’t we also have 5 times many more successful businesses? Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

If statistics were actually true, well, we do have a lot of Malay entrepreneurs. But not many are first class at what they do. At least in my industry, there seems to be quite a few Malay owned IT-based businesses. But like I said, not many are first class. The ones that I do see, like Ten Fingers (the people behind the now… well kind of dead, anakmelayu.com), who started off from the ashes of the dot com bubble continue to exist today. I think that’s a good thing for them. They built something really interesting (then), and survived long enough after the novelty faded away. But they are still kind of run-of-the-mill in a way. Except for the fact they are able to do IVR systems, it doesn’t define them as IVR specialists. Malay businesses should find niches.

Malay businesses shouldn’t look at this as a depressing reality. They should see this as room for improvement. There are a lot of things they could do to make it one day.

But there are no shortcuts to success. I strongly believe in education. I strongly believe a University degree for every Malay youth is necessary to have that opportunity to be someone. And we should do that with our youth. If my rudimentary research counts for something, well, do you know that a Malay youth is 60% more likely to get arrested than go to University? Let the numbers do the talking. Just don’t let it get to you. Numbers are numbers. People invented numbers. We can change that.