Interview: Chinese companies welcome to bid for high-speed rail between Malaysia, Singapore: official

The Kuala Lumpur- Singapore high-speed rail (HSR) project has aroused interest of potential bidders, and Chinese companies are welcome to participate in the tender, said a senior Malaysian official.

"We appreciate that China has developed the longest railway network now in the world and we have heard about the competitiveness of the Chinese companies," Abdul Wahid Omar, minister of the Prime Minister's Department who in charge of the economy planning, told Xinhua in an interview.

The minister said parties from China and other countries had demonstrated their interest to participate in the planned project, which would trim the door-to-door traveling time between the two countries' capitals to within 90 minutes.

Abdul Wahid said discussions were underway between Malaysia and Singapore to work on the details and the technical issues, adding that Singapore was expected to nail down the location of the terminal on its side soon, while Malaysia had decided on their side for the terminal to be Bandar Malaysia, south of Kuala Lumpur.

"There will be a leaders' retreat between our two prime ministers in Singapore on May 5. We hope that maybe by then Singapore would make a decision on the location of the terminal," he said, adding that many issues beyond that still had to been worked down before the project could go to tender.

As to the Malaysian economy, Abdul Wahid said Malaysia was on its way to achieve the Economic Transformation Program launched by Prime Minister Najib Razak in 2010 to raise the country into the high-income economy category by 2020 by targeting Gross National Income per capital of 15,000 U.S. dollars.

A number of key projects and programs had been implemented, which helped Malaysian economy grow by 4.7 percent in 2013 and 6 percent in 2014, he said, adding that the momentum of the economic growth was expected to continue.

Abdul Wahid said as a net exporter of oil and gas, Malaysia had been impacted by the drop in oil prices this year. "One is in terms of the impact on our growth in economy. It will reduce our economy by 0.5 percent, and that's why we revised downward our growth forecast for 2015 to between 4.5 to 5.5 percent," he said.

The operating expenditure of the government would also be cut by 5.5 billion ringgit (about 1.52 billion dollars) due to the lower revenue.

However, Abdul Wahid said the drop in oil prices would not have any impact on the proceeding of the Kuala Lumpur-Singapore HSR project, as the rail project involved private sector.

It would be a private-public partnership model with the government just as a funding part of the entire amount of the project cost. "So I think the requirement for funding from the government will be much less compared to if we were to do it as normal development expenditure," he said. Endi