Leon Foong, CEO of SOCAR Malaysia.

South Korean car sharing company, SOCAR, founded in 2011, has entered the Malaysian market as their first overseas expansion.
 
Officially launched on January 23, 2018,Leon Foong and his team aspire to bring that same commitment and drive that was birthed in Jeju, South Korea, to the Malaysian environment - ushering in a norm-defying keyless era in the car-sharing scene. With just a smartphone,users are able to register, book, unlock and drive assigned cars from locations near them to get to their destination.
 
“Our first mission here in Malaysia is to make multiflex transportation a reality giving commuters the flexibility to choose from multiple modes of transport, whether it is a combination of public transport, e-hailing or car-sharing to get from A to B. We want to make multiflexing easy, affordable and accessible with the ultimate goal to empower the masses to give up car ownership and to embrace the multiflex lifestyle,”shared Foong. SOCAR also offers a D2D (door-to-door) service where your  car will be delivered to your doorstep and picked up by a SOCAR personnel once you finish your journey, saving commuters the hassle of finding and paying for parking.
 

The Right Fit

Reception has been favourable, and its mushrooming growth speaks volumes. In a duration of nine months, they have grown from 240 cars operating in 100 zones at launch, to an astounding 700 cars operating in 350 zones across Klang Valley, with plans to launch soon in JohorBahru.  All this is made possible by leveraging the right technology in a robust ecosystem and sufficient support.
 
“Trust is essential in all sharing platforms and at SOCAR , we run a customer-centric business and build that trust. We use the right technology to screen those who register on the platform; we use technology to understand people’s driving behaviour and most importantly,to address any glitches that our customers experience in real time while constantly seeking to improve our system,” said Foong.
 
 The presence of other e-hailing companies such as Grab and the development of the MRT infrastructure are draw cards, showing the maturity of the Malaysian populace and their readiness to adopt new technologies. SOCAR’s presence taps into the thriving automotive industry in Malaysia, partnering with brands such as Perodua, Honda, Volkswagen, BMW,  Mini and more.
 
“We know that Malaysia is at the epicentre of transformation and the population here is receptive to that change. Whether it means adapting to a growing digital ecosystem or rapidly evolving lifestyle choices. Our recent collaboration with Prasarana,  Touch ‘n Go and Pestle and Mortar Clothing,really sums that up. We had a first-ever fashion show on the train as part of the launch of #MultiflexFriday in partnership with Prasararana, an event with the goal to make taking public transportation (and being a mutiflexer)synonymous to ‘fun’,” shared Foong.
 

Ascending the Value Chain

As the only other country with SOCAR’s presence – aside from South Korea – Foong stressed that Malaysia would be a great springboard as a regional hub to expand to other Southeast Asian countries. The key to this was due to three factors – efficiency, productivity and convenience.
 
Key technologies such as Internet of Things(IoT), Machine-to-Machine (M2M) modems, and telematics are being developed both in Korea and Malaysia as part of a combined effort to enable them to leverage data and improve efficiency across their entire chain of operations. Moving forward, the company aims at developing more of these technologies locally as part of their plan to make Malaysia a technology hub especially in areas of engineering and customer support. This is important to them in order to localise swiftly and expand to other countries within the region.
 
“We want to focus on operating efficiently and offer our car-sharing services at affordable rates – ensuring also that nobody has to walk more than 5-10 minutes to get to their SOCAR ride.
 
Furthermore, we are looking at different partnerships, whether it is insurance players or property developers, we seek mutually beneficial partnerships so that they can offer customers our car-sharing service while we focus on things that matters – having the right insurance policies in place, offering the right prices, providing the right types of cars, and selecting the right zones for our services.
 
Elaborating more on the technologies leveraged, Foong revealed that SOCAR utilises several other technologies,namely IoT and Big Data Analytics. “Google BigQuery,  MySQL and MongoDB are used for our day-to-day data analytics. We strive to better consolidate our data, and have it all stored in one centralised Data Management Platform. No doubt, with these enablers we are able to tap into the data to improve our efficiency.”
 
The business comprises multiple moving components, and in order to monitor it, the company utilises Oracle’s NetSuite to scale and track their business capabilities with speed. “We need cloud-based services like NetSuite in order to reduce the capex investments on our part,while allowing us to scale our accounting and financial capabilities at the same speed as our business,” revealed Foong.
 

A Positive Future

Foong, an optimist, believes that digitalisation will create more high value jobs. He believes that it will create a whole new ecosystem that is rife with new opportunities while reducing the organisational hierarchy gap with easy accessibility to data. Data is everything and it helps to improve productivity by removing layers – once democratised. Leveraging on data lakes allow for better decision-making processes, improving productivity and thus translating to higher GDP per capita and more high-value activities.
 
“There is huge potential in the Malaysian talent pool, which I see will definitely spur the growth of areas such as BigData, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. The readiness to learn and innovate in the digital sphere will fuel this growth as well,” said Foong.
 
When asked of Malaysia’s readiness for digital transformation Foong expressed enthusiasm for the country’s digitalfuture commenting, “Digitalisation is all about people. You can’t enforce digitalisation when your workforce is trained around non-digitised solutions and expect them to make use of these digital solutions. Having said that, the appetite here in Malaysia is promising and Malaysians are always ready to try something new – whether  it means using technology to get laundry done, food delivered, or seek domestic help services.”