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The QI Group of Companies is a diversified multinational entity with regional offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines and a wide range of subsidiary companies in nearly 30 countries. The Group has six main business lines diversified into lifestyle and leisure, luxury, training and education, property development and management, logistics and an e-commerce based retail & direct sales business. The constantly evolving Group has also invested in the hospitality segment in Sri Lanka, Thailand, South Africa and Turkey through a range of spa resorts and boutique hotels.

The Group ventured into the education sector in 2011 with the establishment of the Quest International University (QIU) in partnership with the State Government of Perak in Ipoh, Malaysia. In 2016 QI announced an investment in the QI City project, the first of its kind fully integrated education hub, comprising of a teaching hospital, the QIU campus, three condominium blocks, a convention centre and hotel suites.

The QI Group is a Forum Partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and a strategic partner of the Malaysian-based Asian Strategy & Leadership Institute (ASLI). QI has also recently been accepted as a member of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE).

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A Malaysian entrepreneur, philanthropist and author, Vijay Eswaran is the founder and Executive Chairman of the QI Group of Companies. He is also the founder of Quest International University in Malaysia, and has established the RYTHM Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the QI Group. Eswaran grew up in Malaysia and moved to the UK as a student where he worked as a taxi driver to fund his higher education in accounting and management. He then spent several years working as an information systems engineer for various companies, including IBM in North America. He moved back to Southeast Asia after spending 13 years in the West. In 1998, Eswaran established a direct selling network in the Philippines, which would eventually become QNET, using a revolutionary combination of direct selling and e-commerce. Eswaran established the QI Group of Companies to oversee a wide variety of investments including real estate, education, retail and hospitality. His passion for mentoring entrepreneurs led him to establish and chair Quest International University (QIU) in partnership with the Malaysian Perak state’s local government in 2011. QI is currently constructing Qi City, a $300 million development, which will serve as the new headquarters for QIU and will include a hospital, condominiums and retail space. In 2005, he founded the RYTHM Foundation, with a focus on community development in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Among its many projects, the Malaysian chapter of the Foundation established TAARANA, a school for children with special needs. Eswaran has published three bestselling books on leadership and mindfulness, with In the Sphere of Silence selling half a million copies to date. He is a regular speaker at global events including the World Economic Forum and has received numerous awards, among them the ASEAN Business Advisory Council and Lifetime Achievement Award for Global Entrepreneurship in 2016.

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The QI Group is a company of diverse individuals who, for 16 years, have been working together with one mission: Making A Difference. We are an organisation comprised of people coming from different upbringings and cultural backgrounds and with that, we make our work so much fruitful and fun.

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KUALA LUMPUR: A brisk increase in student intake has spurred the QI Group of Companies to set its sights on setting up the first-ever university township in Perak, when it builds Quest International University Perak(QIUP)'s permanent campus in Gua Tempurung, outside Ipoh.

QIUP's campus, covering 100 hectares, initially with an option to develop a further 80 hectares, is expected to materialise in five years, QI Group Founder and Executive Chairman, Datuk Seri Vijay Eswaran, said recently.

QIUP, temporarily housed at Jalan Kampar in Ipoh, chalked up an exponential growth in student intake to over 1,000 now, from a mere 98 when set up in 2010, and the number is likely to double next year (2015).

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Besides, he said, the intake of foreign students would eventually be boosted by the creation of the Asean Economic Community by 2015, given that Asean is potentially one of the largest catchment areas for students.

This is in view of the fact that 180 million middle-income households would be coming onstream regionally, by then, and "it would be very silly for us not to be looking at our own (regional) backyard," he told Bernama, in an interview.

QIUP plans to open branches in Sabah and Sarawak.

Its Chief Operating Officer, Nicholas Goh, said: The university is expecting to have between 23 and 24 programmes this year, from two foundation courses and two degree programmes, when we started out in 2011."

Vijay said that holistic education would be part of QIUP's academic thrust, much like his alma mater, Southern Illinois University in Carbondale — the university town in Chicago, which is larger than Singapore.

Like in Carbondale, which led in providing an ecological environment, he said that QIUP's campus in Gua Tempurung, would be premised on instilling students with the "green" concept, with a love for the environment and the community.

The Perak State goverment has equity participation in QIUP, jointly with the QI group.

Vijay said that Perak Menteri Besar, Datuk Seri Dr Zambry Abdul Kadir, was very supportive of a university township which offered a holistic educational experience, springing up in the Kinta Valley.

"We will be off the grid, as far as electricity is concerned, as we will be using solar energy as much as possible; cycling would be encouraged, and student classes and discussions conducted in the open," he said.

"We don't have anything close to Carbondale in Malaysia. Public universities here have their own campuses, but not in the sense of having created their own aura, or building a university township experience."

QI aims to build QIUP into a research-driven university, not just focusing on first degrees and masters programmes, but also offer post-graduate courses and training in nutrition green technology and traditional chinese medicine (TCM).

"We want to be at the cutting edge of the nutrition business and wellness, bringing eastern and western medicine educational systems together. Maybe offering a medical degree with Ayurvedic medicine, or TCM woven into the programme," said Vijay.

He said QI's foray into the education sector, was a way of giving back to society, for the diversified multinational conglomerate with interests in direct selling, e-commerce, lifestyle & leisure, luxury and collectibles, as well as property development and project management.

Asked how QI, which has regional offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, would reconcile its business interests with that of education, via QIUP, he said: "Our students are attracted to the fact that there is a big group behind it, as QI has the facilities to provide industrial training, both here and overseas, and eventually hire them.

QI's networking will be synergistic to QUIP, as its hospital project in Meru Valley, Klang, is on and would emerge as a full-fledged university, training medical, dental, nursing, bio-technology and pharmacy students.

Meanwhile, Goh said that QIUP would introduce a number of new programmes, including Masters in Business Administration for its Business School and Bachelor in Mass Communication, to cater to a wider range of school leavers and take in foreign students for the first time this year.

The university had received applications from Mauritius, Iraq and Bangladesh, and is looking for foreign students in other countries as well.

Vijay said that Vietnam and Cambodia were potentially lucrative markets for QIUP, as a major portion of the middle-class population in these countries, were looking for overseas universities to further their education.

"We are counting on this to build our edge, coupled with our affordability," he said.

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Through this video, the QI Group shares the story of its humble beginnings, inspiring leadership and how the company has diversified and grown into a powerful multinational conglomerate with offices around the globe.

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With your help! we can do it! QI Group is committed to helping communities in over 19 countries. Our vision to Raise Yourself To Help Mankind aims to support those in need, and help those to achieve their dreams. Make your commitment to help us create a future for everyone. Thank you for those who have helped communities survive, thrive, and grow stronger.

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The QI Group of Companies is a diversified multinational entity with regional offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines and a wide range of subsidiary companies in nearly 30 countries. The Group has six main business lines diversified into lifestyle and leisure, luxury, training and education, property development and management, logistics and an e-commerce based retail & direct sales business. The constantly evolving Group has also invested in the hospitality segment in Sri Lanka, Thailand, South Africa and Turkey through a range of spa resorts and boutique hotels. The QI Group is a Forum Partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and a strategic partner of the Malaysian-based Asian Strategy & Leadership Institute (ASLI).  QI has also recently been accepted as a member of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE). To learn more, visit www.qigroup.com

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In the early 1900s, it was the Luddites smashing weaving machines. These days, retail staff worry about automatic checkouts.  Professional drivers are already fretting over self-driving cars and trucks.   There is no denying the fact automation has been decimating more and more jobs every year. From supermarket cashiers to postal workers and travel agents, industries and jobs that were considered mainstays barely a decade ago are vanishing rapidly. McKinsey Global Institute predicts that as many as 800 million jobs could be lost worldwide to automation by 2030. In India, 5.7 crore jobs may be displaced by automation by 2030, the report predicts. It is feared that automation could gain further steam in 2018, rendering nearly 70 per cent of the Indian workforce irrelevant. The employment picture Innovation is actually creating jobs faster than automation and technology are destroying them. Entirely new industries have emerged in recent years, creating jobs that didn't exist ten years ago - app developers, YouTube content creators, social media managers and data scientists, to name a few. India is perhaps the most prominent example of this trend.  Nasscom, the apex body of the IT industry, said that tech startups, e-commerce, Digital India and digital payments are creating new opportunities for growth.  Acknowledging that increasing automation may eat up a section of the jobs, but new areas such as Cybersecurity, Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning etc are creating new job opportunities. Findings from the recent McKinsey report also indicates that for all the jobs that will be lost to automation in the next 13 years, hundreds of millions of new jobs will be created in response to emerging economies, aging populations and technology development. Knock on benefits of tech There are two secondary factors often forgotten or misunderstood, which some economists have long realised. The first is the knock-on benefits that come with higher productivity. Companies are able to invest more, hire more, produce more, lower prices, and consumers are able to purchase more. Perhaps more importantly, there are the secondary jobs enabled by technology which would either not exist or are enabled and multiplied by technology. The gig economy pioneered by the likes of Uber and AirBnB, is a popular example of this. Advanced technologies like AI will spawn new jobs and fears around job losses are misplaced. IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad was recently quoted in a media interview, "If a person is not up to date in new technology, then he may have a problem. You have to be tuned to the new technology," he warned. Nasscom identified 55 new job roles and 155 new-age skill that would be required for the future. Big data and analytics are two major areas opening up and are expected to grow eightfold to $16 billion by 2025, with a spurt in demand for business analysts, solution architects, data integrators, data architects, data analysts and data scientists. Data from HR firm Kelly's Services shows a 15% increase in hospitality, 8% increase in retail and an 18% reduction in IT jobs in 2017. Companies in the information technology are realigning and re-skilling their workforce to address this rapidly changing requirement. The changing norms of up-skilling are soon to be followed in other sectors as well thus creating a plethora of new aged jobs. Up the job value and skill chain Technology is also enabling some long-established industries and helping them evolve in the 21st century. The more than a century old direct selling industry, which has produced millions of micro-entrepreneurs around the world was founded on the principles of people connecting with each other. With technology seamlessly connecting people and products across international borders, the industry has exploded in recent years. Malaysian entrepreneur Vijay Eswaran, Executive Chairman of the QI Group, one of those businesses is in direct selling recently commented on this in an Op-Ed on a European policy website. "It is important to remember that technology isn't creating jobs: people are. But the opportunities would not exist without technology. Technology enabled our network of entrepreneurs to go out and sell products to many more people in remote places, making money for themselves and creating income opportunities for people in countries from Ghana to India to Indonesia." Clarissa Shen, COO of Udacity whose revenues stood at $71 million in 2017, also stresses on the need of re-skilling. "People should reskill themselves and go after new opportunities. As a company, we do not want to be complacent and we want to tell people that they can succeed by learning. I have great examples from the largest telecom provider in India, where kids picked up Udacity courses in free Wifi zones in their stores, picked up on skills and ultimately changed their lives by getting engineering jobs that finally helped their families." To sum up, technology innovations are spurring jobs faster than they are destroying them, but the need of re-skilling is a reality that people will need to address to stand against the face of automation. As Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada in his address at Davos put it: "The pace of change, especially technological change, has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again."

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KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian entrepreneurs must make a wider impact by expanding into the international market, starting with the large Asean population, says businessman Vijay Eswaran.

“Asean is actually our own captive market, yet we are not capitalising on that market. If Malaysia wants to make it as a global trading nation, we must capitalise on Asean.

Businessmen should not get comfortable only doing business in the domestic market, as the country’s current population of 30 million people was not enough to sustain their business for the long term, especially if they had plans to expand, he said.

“This is unlike Indonesia, which has a population of about 300 million and therefore a more sustainable market for a longer term. But there are not many Malaysian brands that are famous there,” he told Bernama.

Eswaran, who is chairman of QI Group, said Malaysians could look at the markets in just three of the 10 Asean members, which have a total population of almost 500 million: Indonesia (300 million), the Philippines (100 million) and Vietnam (100 million).

Malaysia’s location, at the centre of the region, made it “a natural hub for the Southeast Asian market. We are connected all the way across the region.”

He said Malaysia had a foot in both mainland Asia through the peninsula, and archipelagic Asia through Borneo. Malaysian products and brands should be moving across Asean, he said.

“We should be pushing our businesses in the Asean region more aggressively, allowing for both ways of trade. We have created a mentality of job creators in our education system. We have to create more incubators, we need to have more of a start-up mentality. The problem we are facing in Asean currently is the lack of this mentality,” he said.

Asean comprises Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia.

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Since the turn of the century, it has often been said that all the promise of technological progress is set to collide with the rising tide of population growth in the form of many millions of lost jobs on the altar of automation, resulting in a full-blown employment catastrophe – more catastrophic than any economic meltdown we’ve seen before.

This argument, once reserved for futurologists and academics, has seeped into popular consciousness. Elites at Davos, Switzerland, and tabloids alike, fret about the march of the machines, artificial intelligence, and robotics, as we head into a supposedly jobless future.

The “Luddite Fallacy”: a moral panic

Many of these fears stem from a University of Oxford study in 2013. This study made a much-quoted prediction that 47% of jobs in the USA were under threat of automation in the next two decades. Several other recent studies have made yet more drastic prognostications. A 2017 report compiled by McKinsey predicts that as many as 800 million jobs could be lost worldwide to automation by 2030.

This worry is nothing new. We have seen waves of anxiety at technological change ever since the dawn of the industrial revolution in the early 19th century, as machines began to replace skilled human workers for certain types of highly paid jobs. Back then, a group of textile workers violently, and famously, smashed the new machines that made their skills redundant, giving rise to the term “Luddite Fallacy”, describing the thinking that innovation would have lasting harmful effects on employment.

But futurists like Martin Ford and Silicon Valley’s techno-evangelists argue that the technology today is substantially more disruptive and fundamentally different from everything that came before.

A world of work

The world of work certainly has changed a lot since I started out in business in the 1980s. To quote Justin Trudeau’s Davos address, “the pace of change, [especially technological change,] has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.” And for sure, technology is destroying jobs. From supermarket cashiers to postal workers and travel agents, industries and jobs that were considered mainstays barely a decade ago are vanishing rapidly.

But from my vantage point as an entrepreneur with businesses in emerging markets, innovation is already creating jobs more quickly than automation and technology are destroying them. Entirely new industries have emerged in recent years , creating jobs that didn’t exist ten years ago — app developers, YouTube content creators, social media managers and data scientists, to name a few.

Creating the workforce of the future

However, there are two secondary factors often forgotten or misunderstood, which some economists have understood for many years. The first is the knock-on benefits that come with higher productivity. Companies are able to invest more, hire more, produce more, lower prices, and consumers are able to purchase more.

Perhaps more importantly, there are the secondary jobs enabled by technology which would either not exist or are enabled and multiplied by technology. The gig economy pioneered by Uber is a popular example of this.

A lesser known, but perhaps more impactful example is the direct selling industry, which has produced many millions of microentrepreneurs around the world. My direct selling company was an early adopter of e-commerce platforms and our business quickly became one of the most successful networks globally. Technology enabled our network of entrepreneurs to go out and sell products to many more people in remote places, making money for themselves and creating income opportunities for people in countries from Ghana to Indonesia.

It is important to remember that technology isn’t creating jobs: people are. But the opportunities would not exist without technology.

People often look for guidance from policy makers and bureaucrats to save us, to help us navigate this mammoth change. I say the answer lies, as it almost always does, in the entrepreneurial spirit of people. Yes, we need governance, smart regulation, and innovation in education. But governments must learn not to focus on protecting old jobs. First and foremost, we must allow and encourage ordinary people to dream up new businesses.

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THE push to empower adolescent girls in the country is set to gain momentum with the launch of the Maharani Trainer Kit (MTK) by the QI Group’s philanthropic arm, the Vijayaratnam Foundation.

The MKT, based on the experiences and feedback from dozens of programmes, is aimed at inspiring and empowering poor, marginalised and socially excluded teenage girls through the provision of skill and knowledge.

At the launch, foundation chairman Datin Sri Umayal Eswaran said the MKT can be used as a reference point for trainers who have experience working with teenage girls to run social empowerment programmes and will be a “live” document that will continue to evolve and improve.

One main goal of making the MKT available is to ensure standardisation of content, sustainability of the training programmes and allow its modules to be used individually or cumulatively.

“It is my hope that each of us can play an important role to provide adolescent girls with the tools they need to become socially and economically empowered,” Umayal said.

“We aim to inspire today’s generation of women to think bigger, dream higher and to be the best they can, to become women of character with confidence and who are motivated to achieve excellence in life.

“Investments in girls are investments in everyone’s future.

“It is the girls’ life trajectories that determine the health, education, wealth and success of each generation,” she added.

By itself, the Vijayaratnam Foundation’s own Maharani programme to tackle social issues and challenges faced by teenage girls, has touched the lives of more than 5,000 youths since 2010.

The Trainer Kit is categorised into three modules, focusing on: self-discovery, being one with nature and building communication and leadership skills.

Petaling Jaya MP Maria Chin Abdullah, who attended the launch, echoed Umayal’s sentiments on investing in girls.

“Adolescence for boys typically ushers increased mobility and autonomy, but for girls, it comes with increased restrictions – fewer opportunities and less freedom to exercise choice.

“Reaching out to girls during adolescence is critical as decisions made and behaviour established during this period affect their horizons later in life.

“Investing in them is not only fair, it is a smart social and economic move.”

Read more at https://www.thestar.com.my/metro/metro-news/2018/05/24/foundation-aims-to-empower-teenage-girls-through-training-kit/#0IUHIzKxQi9qzmv8.99