Recent Developments On The Implementation Of Environment, Social And Governance (ESG)

ESG in Malaysia is in different phases for different entities. For the larger public listed companies, the levels of awareness and implementation are relatively high compared to the smaller companies especially the Small and Medium Enterprises ("SMEs").

In fact, there are SMEs that consider the whole ESG arena as being something they need not know about. They feel ESG has nothing to do with them at all and is the concern of large companies. Those SMEs that are aware of ESG appear to feel that this just adds additional costs to their operations which they are not willing to bear. Lack of awareness, capacity constraints and implementation difficulties appear to be the major stumbling blocks.