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RM8.3 Billion, 99 Companies, One Coalition: The Blueprint Malaysia Already Has for What AI Could Do Next

By 2018, Malaysia's Vendor Development Programme had helped 99 local companies win RM8.3 billion in oil and gas contracts. By 2024, the wider ecosystem it helped seed had grown to 1,855 companies doing RM94.5 billion in combined revenue, according to the Malaysia Petroleum Resources Corporation. None of that was one company's doing. It took three: Petronas as the anchor buyer, banks providing financing built for the transformation itself, and government agencies coordinating the training underneath it. That three-way coalition, not any single actor, is the real story — and it's the argument at the heart of my book, The Missing Middle.

What actually happened, and what didn't

Starting in 1993, Petronas opened specific, reserved contract scopes to local companies — real work, won on merit, with Petronas as the guaranteed buyer. Banks structured financing against those contracts rather than against a vague growth story. Agencies like SIRIM and later MDEC and TalentCorp built the technical training that matched what the contracts actually required. Each piece alone would have done little. A contract without financing doesn't get built. Financing without training doesn't get delivered on. Training without a buyer at the end of it doesn't get used. Together, over thirty years, they moved thousands of small Malaysian companies several rungs up the capability ladder.

It's worth being honest about the limits of that story too. This coalition only fully formed in one sector. Electronics manufacturing, construction, ports — all have plenty of small suppliers beneath large anchors, and none built the same three-way structure. Even within oil and gas, it took three decades of deliberate, sustained coordination to reach today's numbers. This wasn't fast, and it wasn't automatic.

Why AI changes the size of the opportunity

That's exactly why AI matters here, and why the opportunity now is arguably bigger than the one Petronas took in 1993. The slowest, most expensive part of that thirty-year story was building capability itself — certifications, technical know-how, the years it took a small vendor to become genuinely competent. AI lowers that cost. An SME today can use AI to do things that once required years of accumulated technical staff and expensive external expertise: quality checks, compliance documentation, engineering analysis, even parts of product design. The capability-building step that used to take a decade could, with the right support, take a fraction of that.

Which means the same coalition — an anchor company willing to make its smaller partners' AI adoption a condition of the relationship rather than an afterthought, banks willing to finance that specific transformation, and agencies willing to coordinate the training around it — could move faster and reach far more companies than the VDP ever could. The bottleneck isn't the technology anymore. It's whether anchor companies, banks, and government are willing to play the same coordinated role for AI that they played for oil and gas vendors, this time economy-wide instead of sector-specific.

It's not just a Malaysian idea

Saudi Aramco ran a similar three-way model, iktva, for the past decade and this year hit a 70% local-content target — adding an estimated $280 billion to Saudi Arabia's GDP and over 200,000 jobs along the way. Different country, same underlying mechanism: an anchor, financing, and coordination, working together on purpose. It's proof the model is repeatable wherever the three parties choose to show up together.

The question this leaves

Petronas, Malaysian banks, and government agencies already proved, over thirty years, that this coalition works when it forms. AI is the first capability shift since then that could let it work at a fraction of the time and reach every sector, not just one. The open question isn't whether Malaysian SMEs can make the leap — oil and gas already answered that. It's whether enough anchor companies, banks, and agencies are willing to build that same coalition again, now that AI has made the leap itself so much shorter.

Sources: Petronas Vendor Development Programme history and VDPx launch, The Edge Malaysia; Malaysia OGSE industry revenue and vendor data, MPRC via PETRONAS Global; PETRONAS Supplier Support Programme and sustainability financing, PETRONAS FLOW; Aramco iktva 70% local content milestone, Aramco; Aramco iktva programme overview, Vision 2030.

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