Top 100 winners of government open-tender contracts
Investigating government procurement in Malaysia
Kuang Keng Kuek Ser
In a first-of-its-kind analysis on the public record of Malaysian federal government procurement, it was found that the top 100 companies which received the highest value of open-tender contracts dominated 38% of the total contract value tendered from 2005 to early 2014.
The analysis was done on the 8,886 open-tender contracts published by government procurement website MyProcurement until Mac 6, 2014.
The total value of these contracts is RM32 billion, and the top 100 companies acquired RM12.22 billion or 38 percent of it although they make up merely 2.38% of the total 4,203 companies that received contracts.
Each of the 100 companies received an average of RM122.23 million contract value, significantly higher than the average amount of RM7.21 million received by each of the 4,203 companies. Despite the high average contract value, about half of these big players won only one contract as their contracts were those of high value.
Meet the big boys
On top of the list is Primabumi Sdn Bhd, a drug supplier that secured RM876,236,864 from a total of 202 contracts mostly given by the Health Ministry and the Higher Education Ministry. The first runner-up is Inai Kiara Sdn Bhd, which has been reported to have links with politically-connected tycoon Syed Mokhtar Albukhary, with its Taiwanese joint-venture partner Hwa Chi Construction Co Ltd.
Together, these companies have received 909 or 10.23% of the total 8,886 open-tender contracts.
Who gave the contracts?
Five ministries contributed to nearly 70% of the total contract value received by the top 100 companies.
These ministries are:
Health Ministry 22.29%
Prime Minister's Department 13.94%
Ministry of Rural and Regional Development 12.73%
Works Ministry 11.42%
Defense Ministry 8.71%
This chart connects the giver and receiver of each contract. Each line represents a contract and the thickness represents the value of the contract. The number next to each ministry label is the percentage of total contract value given to the 100 companies. Mouseover to see the contract value. Drag the blocks to rearrange them for better visualization.
The missing RM1.7 billion contracts
During the analysis, it was found that the website, launched in 2010 as part of the Government Transformation Programme (GTP), contains plenty errors including incomplete details and typos.
A total of 276 contracts or 5.32 percent of the total contracts have no information of the companies that secured them. These 'missing contracts' worth RM1.7 billion in total.
The worst part is the absence of the tender dates of all contracts. We can only guess the tender dates of some contracts based on their tender numbers. From the tender numbers, a small number of contracts were believed to be issued as early as 2005. We believed the published list is not a complete list of open-tender contracts as the total number of contracts – 8,886 - is way too small for a government in a period of nine years.
Notes about data cleaning
To conduct accurate analysis, several steps have been taken to clean and repair the low-quality data scrapped from the MyProcurement website.
All descriptions of “Sdn Bhd” (private limited) and “Syarikat” (company) in company names have been removed as they were spelled in different ways; e.g. “Sdn. Bhd.”, “Sendirian Berhad”, or “Sykt”, “Syk”, “Sykt.”.
Best attempts have been made to correct typos when company names were spelled differently by matching their registration numbers. However some companies did not have their registration numbers stated, or the registration numbers themselves were wrong, making the whole process of data cleaning difficult and tedious.
Names of the various government agencies have been consolidated by merging agencies into the ministries they belong to, and standardizing agency names which have been changed over time; e.g. “Kementerian Pelajaran” and “Kementerian Pendidikan”, “Kementerian Wilayah” and “Kementerian Wilayah Persekutuan dan Kesejahteraan Bandar”.
One contract was given to two companies - ROYCE PHARMA and FIDIN UNIVERSAL - but the record did not state the value of contract split between the two company.