Cost efficiency is the key to success in business. In a simple explanation, if one company can reduce the cost of its products or services below par of its competitors; this will translate into lower selling price with the same if not better in quality. Eventually, this company will do better in term of sales. This is the basic survival rule in business.
In a broader sense, if one listed company is able to increase its cost efficiency and competitiveness. It will be able to save money for the very same products or services provided and that will increase the margin of the company and making room for more flexible and competitive selling price. Then the company will make more money, which means the shareholders will be benefited from the dividend yield. The end users are equally benefited from the lower cost of their products and services. Effectively our money is made more valuable and that will bring down the inflation rate.
We are talking about globalization nowadays. It is not making sense at all if any company still ignoring competition from its peers.
Corruption is one of the major reasons behind the sky-rocking production cost in a company with irresponsible and unscrupulous management team. It is very easy to bring up the production cost by adding up the irrelevant expenses that only benefited the few members of the management. At this junction, we realize the importance of having a responsible and transparent management team for a particular company. This responsibility to scrutinize the listed companies falls on the securities commission of Bursa Malaysia.
I cannot stop but to overstress that every listed companies must be scrutinized as every cent they spent or earned is relevant and related to us as shareholders. One can even extent his or hers imagination that the same phenomena applied to a particular government. If one government can provide a peaceful and safe living condition, why cannot the others? If one government can effectively cut down rate of corruption, why cannot the others? And the list goes on.
The questions are: Who will scrutinize the government? And is he powerful enough to effectively carrying his duty of scrutinizing the empowered government? The answers are obvious; we must have strong, constructive and relevant opposition parties. It is hard to vote for an eligible and good government but it is thousand times harder to be able to have an opposition party of that quality taking consideration into the resources available.
In a nutshell, we really do not have much choice as ordinary citizens who have no interest in politics but are concerned about the present and the future. Democracy has brought about hope and future to the mankind with the election that it promised every few years. Human, at the uppermost in the hierarchy of animal world, evolve naturally to manipulate democracy delicately and intriguingly that may make democracy becomes irrelevant one day.
