Online free search of registered company name and purchase of their company profile with SSM e-Info website

If you are going to start up a new business in Malaysia and would like to check whether the company name you thought of is available or not, now you can check it online for free, with SSM e-Info website.

Other than the above purpose, you can use the same website to check a Malaysian company's information at a small fee payable online. Available information including:

• Company profile: consists of company information, summary of share capital, directors/officers, shareholders, company charges and account summary.
• Company charges: extraction of information from Form 34 (Statement of Particulars to be Lodged with Charge) and Form 40 (Certificate of Registration of Charge).
• Financial comparison: extraction of information from 2 most recent Audited Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss Account of the company.
• Business Profile (for LLP, sole-proprietary, partnership): consists of business information, business address, nature of business, branch information (if any) and current business owner.
• Business Termination Letter: certification of termination of registered Business from SURUHANJAYA SYARIKAT MALAYSIA which verify that the Business is expired or terminated.

In the good old days, you need to go to the office of Companies Commission of Malaysia (Suruhanjaya Syarikat Malaysia, SSM) to perform the searching, checking and information purchasing. This SSM e-Info website eliminates the hassle by making the service available online.

Before you can perform any searching in the website, you need to register a user account by clicking on the "Register Now as e-Account Member" image link on the website. The registration is free and once your account is successfully registered, you can immediately login and make use of the services available.

You can search the company or business by name or by registration number.

If no search result displayed, then the company name you searched for is probably available for new registration application.

If the search found any matching company/companies or business/businesses, it will display their registration number, name, city and state in search result, and you can click a button to purchase further information of the company/business.

My Avantree CGTR-520-W desktop power station with 5 USB charging ports and 2 AC outlets

You've probably read about my Belkin B2E027 4-port 2.4A full rate USB power charger before. It is still working fine and I am still using it.

Recently, I discovered something even better, which is the Avantree CGTR-520-W desktop power station. It comes with 5 smart USB ports, which each single port able to charge up to 2.4A and the total combined charging capacity is 8A.

It also comes with 2 AC sockets (maximum 10A loading) with surge protector of 1,700 Joule and power rating of 1,250W (for 125Vac) or 2,250W (for 225Vac).

You've probably seen it in action when I talked about my KCX-017 USB current and voltage tester in my previous post.

This power station is handy when you have limited wall sockets, as it won't occupy your wall socket and at the same time it extends another socket for your use. You can use its sockets to charge your laptop and other bigger devices that need to be charged with electrical socket instead of USB.

My KCX-017 USB current and voltage tester

Sometimes you will face problem with USB charging such as charging speed slower than normal, unable to charge, or worse still, you encountered a "reverse charging" whereby current is drawn away from the battery of your device instead of charging it.

The problem could be due to faulty charger, faulty USB cable, or faulty USB port of the device to be charged.

In addition, certain 3rd party USB cables are having quality issue with unstable current flow, or only allow low current flow through it.

A USB tester such as the KCX-017 will be handy to diagnose such situations.

This small gadget only cost around RM25, and works well with wall charger, car charger, power bank, etc. by connecting its attached USB cable to the charger, or by connecting the charging cable to its micro-USB port. It will measure the input voltage and display on its LCD screen.

Its other end is a USB port which you can use a USB cable to connect to a charging recipient such as mobile phone, tablet, GPS navigator, etc. Beside the voltage, it will also measure and display the current drawn by the recipient, and also calculate the mAh value of the charging session.

In summary, this gadget is used to:

• Test no-load voltage of the power supply
• Test output power of USB output devices
• Test working voltage and current of the USB output devices
• Test voltage and line loss of charging cables
• Perform real-time monitoring of the charging status

Its specified working environment is as below:

• Voltage range: 3-7V
  
• Current range: 50mA-3,500mA
  
• Capacity range: 0-19,999mAh

When the input voltage is lower than 4.7V or higher than 5.3V, its LCD screen will flash with an arrowhead indicating under-voltage or over-voltage.

This device can record up to 10 sets of readings. There is a button near to its LCD screen.

• Double click the button, the display will start flashing. Single click the button to switch to different memory slot (from 0 to 9). Double click again to use the current memory slot displayed on screen.
• Long press the button will reset the next memory slot reading back to 0000.

This device is able to memorize the last reading when unplugged. The next time when it is turned on again, that reading will be displayed on its LCD screen.

It is a handy device to troubleshoot USB charging problem, as well as to test for the charging quality of USB cables.

My VST-706 3-in-1 car battery voltage monitor, digital thermometer and USB charger

I have just bought this VST-706 car gadget which plugs into the car cigarette lighter socket and function as 3-in-1:

• Battery voltmeter
• Digital thermometer
• USB 2.0 charger

This little car gadget cost less than RM30 and works with car using 12V battery or 24V battery.

The interpretation of its voltmeter reading is as follow:

Its thermometer measuring range is -9 ~ 80 degree Celsius.

The maximum output current of its USB charging port is 2.1A.

With it, you can always monitor the voltage of your car battery and be alerted of its faulty and timing for its end-of-life, before it went flat. The thermometer and USB charger are extra features that good to have too.

My SanDisk Ultra Dual USB Drive 3.0

The price of USB flash drive has eventually gone cheap. Nowadays, you can get a genuine 16GB SanDisk Ultra dual USB drive 3.0 with plug-and-play support to OTG-enabled Android devices at the price of less than RM20.

This SanDisk Ultra dual USB drive 3.0 has 2 connectors. At one end is a USB 3.0 connector that is able to transfer file to computer at a speed of up to 130 MBps (or about 1 Gbps).

Note that there is another product called "SanDisk Ultra dual USB drive" without the "3.0" behind, selling at slightly cheaper price, which the USB connector is a USB 2.0 connector and the data transfer speed is much lower than the 3.0 version.

At the other end is a micro-USB connector that can work on the fly with OTG-enabled Android devices.

Similar with the warranty period of most SanDisk Ultra range of products, this SanDisk Ultra dual USB drive 3.0 comes with a 5 years warranty.

Once plugged into the micro-USB port of the Android device, this USB flash drive is auto-detected by Android as one of the external storages and is immediately accessible by File Manager of Android system.

SanDisk also provides a free mobile app called SanDisk Memory Zone for user to access the USB flash drive and to transfer file between it and the device's internal storage or flash memory card installed in the device.

However, I found the function of this SanDisk Memory Zone app is very limited. It doesn't work with the folders in the USB flash drive so you can only copy file to its root directory, and the copying process is pretty slow.

The only Android app I found that can work with it without hassle is ES File Explorer Pro (or its free version ES File Explorer).

ES File Explorer Pro is able to detect and use this OTG drive upon plugged in, and all file operations of copying, moving, renaming, deleting, creating, opening with associated app, etc. can work well without problem.

ES File Explorer Pro works equally well to access my SanDisk Ultra Dual USB Drive 3.0 with my HTC One M8 smartphone running on Android 6.0 and my Samsung Galaxy Note 5.0 tablet running on Android 4.4.2.

OCBC Bank launched open API for developers to integrate apps with their open data

In line with Singapore Government's Smart Nation Initiative and the Monetary Authority of Singapore's vision to create a Smart Financial Centre and move toward an open API architecture, OCBC Bank has on 17 May 2016 launched their open Application Programming Interface (API) platform, namely CONNECT2OCBC,  that allows software developers to integrate their apps or websites with OCBC's open data related to their products and services.

OCBC claims to be the first in Southeast Asia to introduce such open API service, playing a bigger role in growing the FinTech ecosystem.

For a start, 4 APIs are made available:

• Branch Locator provides a list of OCBC Bank branches with their respective location details and operating hours.
• Credit Card Advisor provides credit card suggestions based on user's lifestyle.
• ATM Locator provides a list of OCBC Bank ATMs with their location details to facilitate users in finding them.
• Forex provides a list of updated currency exchange rates by OCBC, allowing the integrated apps to perform calculations across currencies.

Although these 4 APIs looks limited, it is deemed as a good start. Hopefully more APIs will be made available for broader and deeper usage in the near future.

Click here for more information about the CONNECT2OCBC APIs.

Besides, OCBC has also established a new business unit called The Open Vault @ OCBC, which is a FinTech innovation center aimed to incubate FinTech startups, helping them make products and services that the bank can add to its digital banking arsenal or bring to the market.

The 5 areas of interest of Open Vault @ OCBC are:

• Wealth management
• Credit and financing
• Insurance
• Cyber security
• Artificial intelligence

The center has partnered with Hong Kong venture capital firm Nest to run the OCBC FinTech Accelerator incubation program to provide selected start-ups with business and technical expertise mentorship.

SSPN-i declared 2015 dividend

The Federal Minister of Higher Education, Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh, has just declared the dividend for Skim Simpanan Pendidikan Nasional (SSPN-i) of year 2015 on 6 May 2016.

The 2015 SSPN-i dividend payout rate is 4%, amounting to RM60.8 million. This rate is slightly lower than the previous 4.25% payout for 2014.

Historical SSPN-i dividend payout rate is as below:

• 2015: 4.00%
• 2014: 4.25%
• 2013: 4.25%
• 2012: 4.25%
• 2011: 3.75%
• 2010: 3.25%
• 2009: 2.50%
• 2008: 4.00%
• 2007: 4.00%
• 2006: 4.00%
• 2005: 4.00%
• 2004: 3.00%

If you have opened an SSPN-i account for your child, you should be able to check the amount of dividend received in the account by now (9 May 2016).

Click here to read about how to view your online SSPN-i statement of account.

Today is World Password Day

Today is the  first Thursday of May, the World Password Day! It is observed to create awareness of the need for good password security practice.

Nowadays, password is used everywhere,  being a commonly used security mechanism for:

• identity verification
• authentication of access control
• encryption/decryption key to protect our private information

Here are the 4 steps action to secure your online experience, recommended by organizers of World Password Day:

Why the first Thursday of May? Perhaps this day itself is an interesting day, being observed in:

• 5 May 2016
• 4 May 2017
• 3 May 2018
• 2 May 2019
• 1 May 2020

For more information, visit to : https://passwordday.org/

Warning! Touch n Go cards must be used at least once per year, or you will lose money!

Perhaps not many people aware that their Touch n Go card, if stayed unused for 12 months consecutively, will be deactivated and suspended into dormant state.

The dormant card cannot be used anymore, and your money balance in the card will be locked and rendered unusable, until you get Touch n Go to reactivate the card.

There is an admin fee of RM5 plus GST (total: RM5.30) to reactivate the dormant Touch n Go card.

If you continue to keep the card staying inactive, they will still charge you RM5 plus GST (total: RM5.30) of maintenance fee in every 6 months interval. The maintenance fee will be deducted from the balance in the dormant card, until it reached zero. Then, it becomes a junk plastic card.

In addition, every Touch n Go card has a lifespan of 10 years only, and the expiry date is printed behind the card.

Upon expiry, you can buy a new card and transfer your balance from your expired card into your new card. There is an admin fee of RM5 plus GST (total: RM5.30) for Touch n Go balance transfer too.

Today, there are several highways in Klang Valley that no longer receive cash as toll payment and made compulsory to pay with Touch n Go.

If you are staying outside Klang Valley and were forced to buy a Touch n Go card just to pay the toll during your visit to KL once in a blue moon, you are likely to be affected by this.

According to Touch n Go, you can avoid this situation by using the Touch n Go function in your MyKad instead of purchasing the standalone Touch n Go card. Your MyKad will not become dormant even if you don't use it as Touch n Go card for more than 1 year.

About Private Retirement Scheme (PRS) and its funds performance at end of April 2016

Launched in 2012, the Private Retirement Scheme (PRS) is a voluntary (non-compulsory) retirement scheme in Malaysia for employees and also self employed to have another option of forced saving for their retirement.

In order to encourage savings under PRS, Malaysian government granted personal income tax relief of up to RM3,000 for individuals tax payers from their PRS savings amount deposited during the taxation year. 

Employers are also provided with tax deduction on contributions to the PRS on behalf of their employees above the statutory rate of 19%.

Note that this income tax relief for PRS is available for 10 years only, from tax assessment year 2012 until 2021.

Also note that the sales and admin charges deducted from your PRS contribution is not eligible for tax relief, you can only claim the amount from your net PRS contribution done within the year, up to RM3,000 per year.

Your PRS contributions will be deposited into your Private Pension Administrator (PPA) account, after your PRS fund provider deducted the sales and admin charges.

Your money in your PPA account is split into 2 sub-accounts (a bit similar to your EPF account). Once your money is parked in your PPA account, you can forget about it until you finally retire, because:

• 70% of your fund is parked in Sub-account A, which cannot be withdrawn until you retired.
• 30% of your fund is parked in Sub-account B, which you can only withdrawn once a year, and subject to an 8% tax penalty on the withdrawal amount.

Your money in PPA account is then allocated for investment by your fund manager with your selected fund scheme, which could be of category of growth, moderate or conservative.

There is no guarantee that your PRS fund will give you return. In fact, you can also lose money if your fund is not performing!

How is the performance of the available PRS funds so far?

Morningstar is tracking the PRS funds performance (there are 79 of them as at 30 April 2016) on a day-to-day basis.

As of today (30 April 2016), only 19 or 24% out of the total 79 PRS funds have made a positive year to date return. AmPRS - Asia Pacific REITs is the champion with 4.79% return YTD.

Those 19 PRS funds that have positive return year to date, and their YTD return are as below:

(Screen captured from Morningstar's PRS fund performance tracking website, double click on image to enlarge)

The worst PRS fund performer YTD, CIMB Islamic PRS Plus Asia Pacific Ex Japan Equity fund, has caused a 8.92% lost in 4 months time.

Anyhow, YTD return is for monitoring of latest return performance of the funds. If you see your fund continuously not performance well over a couple of months, you should consider switching over to another fund that is performing well over the same period of time.

Now, let's look at their full year return in 2015. There are a total of 75 PRS funds active in year 2015, and 74 of them had brought positive return, only 1 has lost money.

The champion in 2015 is AmPRS - Islamic Equity Fund with a return of 16.3%. The top 10 PRS funds in 2015 are:

And the bottom 10 PRS funds in 2015 are:

So, does it worth to lock down your money in PRS, and put it in the hand of your PRS fund managers to bring return or lost to you? You decide.

U Mobile attacked competitors again with free video streaming on top of existing data quota

If you have a smartphone or tablet attached with U Mobile postpaid and prepaid service, and you have been using it to watch online videos, here is a good news to you.

U Mobile has just launched their Video-Onz service, providing free additional quota on top of existing data plan for you to watch videos using the apps from the following 12 providers:

• YouTube
• YouTube Gaming
• Youku Tudou
• iflix
• Astro on the Go
• HyppTV Everywhere
• Viu
• Eros Now
• tonton
• Herotalkies
• ONFM
• Pocketimes

This mean that when you are watching videos with these apps, you are given additional quota on top of your existing Internet data quota for the video streaming, for free by U Mobile under the Video-Onz service.

The monthly allocation of the free Video-Onz video streaming quota on top of the existing Internet data quota of various U Mobile postpaid and prepaid plans is as below:

There is no Video-Onz quota imposed for P70, i90 and i130 postpaid plans, meanings you can watch videos or movies with the above 12 video streaming apps as much as you wish, as there is unlimited Video-Onz data for these plans. 

Nowadays U Mobile marketing is really aggressive in capturing the market share by providing competitive package that really can shake and disrupt its competitors, which is a good news for all mobile consumers in Malaysia.

Let's see what will Celcom and Digi offer to counter attack this. Maxis? Maybe their customers need to cry and scream and swear for another time again for them to finally react.

Meanwhile, the P1 (now known as Webe) under TM has been making a lot of hoo-haa recently, but until today the general public is still unclear about what they are going to offer to join this intensified competition.

Earth Day and the story of bottled water

We've just celebrated our Earth Day on 22nd April. This event has once again brought some world attention to the story of bottled water, with a video produced back in 2010.

Here is the video, which has been viewed over 4.7 millions time in YouTube:

So, what's wrong with the bottled water? It is a multi-billion business, sold 290 billion liters in 2014 and expected to continue growing at a CAGR of around 8.5% between 2015 and 2020.

Well, we are told that about half of the bottled water is sourced from tap water, and priced a few hundreds time the price of tap water. It is expensive, sometimes even more expensive than petrol.

Another half is sourced from underground or spring water. What will be the impact to the environment when millions of gallons of water is extracted away 24x7 everyday? Will it change the soil moisture, deplete the wetlands and narrow out the rivers? Will it in turn affect the surrounding ecology, and the aquaculture and agriculture condition?

Anyhow, the main issue is more on the plastic bottle itself than the water contained in it. In order to manufacture the plastic bottle, millions barrels of fossil fuel is consumed, and another millions tonnes of carbon dioxide is generated.

Each year, more than 4 billion pounds of PET plastic bottles end up in landfills or as roadside litter, or worse still, floating in the sea endangering the birds, fishes and other ocean animals. Only less than 20% of plastic the water bottles are actually recycled.
In the United States of America, selling of bottled water is banned in more and more schools and colleges, and even parks.

Therefore, to save our earth and its environment, we should only drink bottled water when necessary, and not to substitute our daily drinking water with it. We should resume our traditional way of drinking filtered or boiled tap water, and use reusable water container to carry some water with us for outdoor drinking.

Negative interest rate - get paid from borrowing and get charged from saving

If you think that you can earn some interest by depositing your money in bank, and you will be charged with interest for borrowing money from bank, you have to reverse your mind-set in certain places that are having negative interest rate policy now.

I'm not kidding. The European Central Banks (ECB), Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden are already having negative interest rate for quite some times. Lately, Japan has joint the league too!

(Chart produced by Toronto Star)

The ECB started this game by charging banks that hold their cash overnight and at the same time offering a premium to banks that borrow in order to extend more loans.

During economic uncertainty time, people tend to be conservative with spending and/or investing and more keen to hoard money in their bank accounts. They are willing to do so even with zero interest rate. This brings the danger of deflation, and as an extreme measure to counter this situation, the banks started to "punish" people that keep money in their bank accounts by charging interest instead of giving interest, and to encourage people to take up loan for business and investment activities by giving interest instead of charging interest.

When this negative interest situation occurs, the traditionally safe havens to put your money, namely bank deposit and bond market, will become the places that most likely cause you to lose money. Yes, fixed deposit is dangerous, bond market is dangerous, because your money will go down the drain if you put it there, in the era of negative interest rate.

However, this measure doesn't seem to be effective to stimulate the economy, as people there are still very cautious and tend to hoard with their money. With the negative interest rate, they are forced to take out their money from bank deposit account, and then they are keeping the money in their drawer or safe instead of spending it. (Reuters: Negative ECB rates fuel demand for safe deposit boxes, German banks say)

The impose of negative interest rate in Eurozone and Japan has shown unfavourable sign of worldwide economy. What will be next after quantitative easing and negative interest rate? If there is no more option ahead, we can foresee a huge economic catastrophe forming and will hit all of us at anytime.

Are you prepared for it? And the question is: how to get prepared for it?

Income tax declaration of property rental - which expenses are deductible and which are not?

For most property owners in Malaysia who rented out their property, the rental collected from tenant is regarded as a non-business source of income and therefore is charged to the owner's income tax under section 4(d) of the Income Tax Act, 1967.

The amount of property rental income need to be declared is the gross rental income deducted by certain expenses incurred by the property in order to generate the rental.

The expenses that are income tax deductible including:

• Assessment
• Quit rent
• Property loan interest
• Fire insurance premium
• Expenses on rental collection
• Expenses on rental renewal, including the stamp duty
• Expenses on repairs and maintenance
• Expenses on replacement of rental assets
• Property service charges, maintenance fees, sinking fund, and Indah Water bills
• Legal expenses on renewal of tenancy agreement, recovery of rental arrears, etc. 
• Expenses on pest control
• Property agent fees/commission to renew the tenancy

The expenses that are not income tax deductible are initial expenses before the property is rented out, including:

• Advertising cost to get the tenant
• Property agent fees/commission to obtain the tenant
• Legal cost and stamp duty for initial tenancy agreement
• Expenses on renovation and improvement to get higher rental or to be more attractive to potential tenant

If the total rental income received is less than the total deductible expenses for the year, which shows that you have rental income loses instead of rental income gains for the year, then your taxable rental income for that particular year will be zero.

Note that rental income losses cannot be used to offset your other taxable statutory income of the year. The losses also cannot be carried forward to the next taxation year.

For more comprehensive information, you can refer to LHDN Malaysia Public Ruling No. 4/2011 : Income From Letting of Real Property.