ABB Malaysia to bring knowledge, expertise to Sabah

KOTA KINABALU: Leading power and automation technologies provider, ABB Malaysia Sdn Bhd, is keen on bringing its knowledge, expertise and global experience to Sabah.

With a history of more than 125 years, ABB is a pioneering technology leader that works closely with utility, industry, transport and infrastructure customers in roughly 100 countries.

ABB possesses more than 40 years of experience in digital technology and is a leader in digitally connected and enabled industrial equipment and systems with an installed base of more than 70,000 control systems connecting 70 million devices.

ABB Malaysia managing director Jukka Poutane, said, the global company established its presence in Malaysia when the first power generator was installed in 1904 by MFO Oerlikon, which is now part of the ABB Group. ABB Malaysia was established in 1973 with its head office based in Subang Jaya, Selangor.

Since the 1970s, Poutanen said, the company has been developing products and also set up a Research and Development (R&D) unit in Malaysia to make software.

Whilst ABB’s main business are located in West Malaysia, he said, the company has been present for many years in Sabah and Sarawak. In fact, ABB Malaysia has established its Sabah branch office in Kota Kinabalu early this year, he said.

To enhance its presence in Sabah, ABB held an open house luncheon yesterday to introduce its new technologies to representatives from utility, oil and gas, contractors, manufacturers, among other sectors.

With more than a century of experience, Poutanen said, ABB has accumulated a wealth of knowledge on different processes and applications in addition to its strong R&D.

“That is the benefit of big companies. We have global research centres in the United States, Europe and Asia and connections to India and China,” he said in an interview here.

For Sabah, Poutanen said, ABB’s key focus areas would be in utilities, agriculture, aquafarming and food-related industries.

He said the company has also recruited a full-time employee dedicated for food and beverage (F&B) and other areas important to Sabah since May this year.

He said ABB hoped to bring its global experience to help industries in improving their productivity and efficiency in their processes.

For instance, Poutanen said, ABB could provide a range of products or services such as control systems, robotics or even anti-bacterial cable strips to enhance F&B processes and productivity.

Another example is that ABB has developed a robot for one of its clients which has the ability not only to separate good and bad cabbages, but also to identify the supplier of the bad cabbages, he said.

He said digitalization was inevitable. The present global figure for digitalization in the F&B industry was 26 percent as compared to the automotive industry at approximately 50 percent, he said.

“The digitalization in the F&B industry is the lowest of all the industries, but there are estimations that the industry will be more digitalized than the automotive in five years’ time.”

On the technology take-up rate for Sabah, Poutanen explained that the starting point was to make things easier, safer and better, and digitalization was one of the tools to achieve that.

He said businesses could start with taking small steps rather than adopting digitalization from day one.

Nonetheless, Poutanen said, being a global company, ABB has accumulated lots of information from similar processes or conditions in other countries and therefore did not have to reinvent the wheel which could take months or even years.

Similarly, he said, any inventions done in Malaysia would be stored in the database where other ABB branches and channel partners could access.

Also present at the interview was ABB Malaysia Head of Account Management and Business Development, Jack Kho Chin Seng.