VERBATIM TEXT

 

SPEECH BY

 

 YAB DATO’ SERI ANWAR IBRAHIM

PRIME MINISTER OF MALAYSIA

 

 

AT

 

THE OPENING CEREMONY OF

DEFENCE SERVICES ASIA (DSA) &

NATIONAL SECURITY ASIA (NATSEC) 2026

 

 

 

20 APRIL 2026 (MONDAY) 9:30 AM

MALAYSIA INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND EXHIBITION CENTRE

KUALA LUMPUR

Assalamualaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh dan Salam Sejahtera.

 

Yang Berhormat Tan Sri Dato’ Dr. Johari bin Abdul,

Speaker Dewan Rakyat;

 

Yang Berhormat Dato’ Seri Mohamed Khaled bin Nordin,

Menteri Pertahanan;

 

Yang Berbahagia Tan Sri Asmat Kamaludin,

Pengerusi DSA Exhibition and Conference Sdn Bhd;

 

Yang Berbahagia Jeneral Datuk Malek Razak Sulaiman,

Panglima Angkatan Tentera; dan

 

Rakan-rakan yang saya muliakan.

 

 

1. Seperti biasa kita mengatur syukur, permulaannya dan seterusnya menyatakan penghargaan atas kejayaan Kementerian Pertahanan bersama dengan DSA menjayakan satu acara untuk perkenalkan jentera pertahanan saya.

 

2. Simpati dengan apa yang diluahkan oleh Tan Sri sebentar tadi, kerana ini ramai mewakili ramai bukan sahaja wanita, tetapi juga pencinta keamanan dan kedamaian dunia.

 

3. Ada kemunasabahan mereka suarakan, kerana dunia ini tidak semestinya diatur oleh golongan yang siuman, dia banyak dipengaruhi oleh kalangan yang mempunyai pandangan yang agak berbeda, menghina atau tujuan untuk menggunakan kekuatan ketenteraan dan senjata untuk menakluki ataupun menekan, dan ini menyebabkan ada keresahan bukan sahaja di kalangan wanita, tetapi ramai rakyat.

 

4. Sebab itu, penjelasan yang dibuat oleh Tan Sri sebentar tadi, saya agak wajar kerana ia lebih banyak memperkenalkan teknologi baru dan pada masa yang sama mempertahankan prinsip keamanan dan keadilan.

 

 

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

 

5. We are meeting today, at a moment when geopolitics is reshaping supply chain decisions as profoundly as cost or engineering capability ever did. A war in West Asia, specifically the Middle East is sending tremors through global markets, driving energy prices up and pushing capital out of some markets.

 

6. Yet in recent weeks, global funds bought over two billion dollars in Malaysian bonds, is the good great news for Malaysia. The highest inflow in ten months. The ringgit has been Asia’s best-performing currency for two consecutive years. Our economy grew 5.2 percent last year.

 

7. Malaysia has also attracted record levels of investment, driven by manufacturing, semiconductors and aerospace manufacturers, largest from the US, China, Germany, and Europe elsewhere in the world.

 

8. None of this arrived without effort. We have relentlessly committed ourselves to policy reforms and sustained engagement with firms and fund managers, many of whom are spoiled for choice as to where they put their money and their manufacturing. That work continues, and we will pursue it with discipline.

 

9. They have seen a government that follows through on what it commits to. They have seen an economy that held its ground while conditions around it deteriorated. And they have seen something that Malaysians ourselves do not say often enough: that this country makes things the world genuinely depends on.

 

10. Companies here manufacture wing structures for some of the most widely flown commercial aircraft in the world. They produce precision components for aero-engines on long-haul routes across every continent.

 

11. Semiconductor plants in Penang and Kulim handle assembly, testing and packaging for chips embedded in defence and security systems.

 

12. One Malaysian-owned company holds Tier 1 supplier status with a leading global aero-engine manufacturer, producing here in Malaysia components that only a small number of countries are trusted to make.

 

13. I wish to take this opportunity to directly speak to the many defence and aerospace companies in this hall.

 

14. What has placed Malaysian manufacturers inside the most demanding commercial supply chains in the world is precisely what is relevant to you. The culture of precision and accountability that satisfies the most exacting commercial buyers does not change at the boundary between civil and defence aerospace. In the vast majority of platforms, it involves the same discipline, applied by the same people, in the same facilities.

 

15. So, to the primes and Tier 1 suppliers here: come and find our manufacturers. Spend time with them. A number of you have already begun to do so and to do precisely and exactly that, and I would invite those who have not or yet to consider seriously why their peers have.

 

16. Malaysia has a policy of active non-alignment, or we in ASEAN says, centrality, engaging with all parties, notwithstanding ideological differences, and major policies shift and that has allowed us to confidently engage with other countries. A Malaysian supplier enters your supply chain without the political complications that have made sourcing decisions so difficult elsewhere. In the current environment, that is a genuine commercial consideration.

 

17. The defence industrial base we are trying to build is one where Malaysian companies earn and hold their place in international supply chains on the strength of their work, where the discipline that wins a contract also keeps it. That is the only foundation worth building on.

 

18. Let me be clear about what government will get right. Intellectual property will be protected promptly and reliably. Strategic trade controls will be enforced. Contracts will hold. The law will apply to everyone in the same way, without exception. These are the conditions without which none of what I have described this morning is possible, and we take that as a major commitment seriously.

 

19. Government’s role in all of this is to create the conditions for serious work to happen. The commercial decisions belong to the companies. What belongs to us is the quality of the ground beneath those decisions.

 

20. If something is not working, if the process creates friction where it should not, or enforcement falls short, tell us directly. We will act.

 

21. The technology on display here is advancing faster than the frameworks designed to govern it. Autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, cyber capabilities: these are already in use. The question of how they are used, by whom, and under what constraints is one that governments must lead, and one that industry cannot stand apart from.

 

22. The conversations that will matter most this week will not take place on this stage. They will take place between people who are meeting for the first time, working through problems that have not yet been fully defined, in the early stages of work that may take years to bear fruit.

 

23. We are glad of course, to be hosting those conversations, and we look forward to what comes out of them.

 

24. With that, I declare DSA and NATSEC Asia 2026 officially open.

 

Terima kasih.