Malaysia's digital leadership pipeline picked up another 126 graduates this week, with the country's communications regulator and Huawei marking the close of two more cohorts of a programme aimed at people running tech inside ministries, big companies and universities.
Editor
Val chevron_right
Table of Contents
The news
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) and Huawei Technologies (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd. held a graduation ceremony in Kuala Lumpur on 11 May 2026 for the second and third cohorts of the Digital Leadership Excellence (DLE) Programme. The 126 graduates come from government, academia and industry, and the ceremony was attended by MCMC chairman Tan Sri Mohamad Salim Fateh Din and Huawei Malaysia chief executive Simon Sun.
Why MCMC and Huawei digital leadership matters
Malaysia's digital economy plans lean heavily on people who can move tech projects through government departments, GLCs and large enterprises, and that capacity is in shorter supply than the headline rollouts suggest. Programmes like DLE aim at the leadership layer rather than coders or engineers, putting senior officials and executives through a curriculum focused on running digital transformation rather than building it from scratch.
Huawei has been steadily growing this kind of training partnership across Southeast Asia, often paired with national agencies. For MCMC, anchoring the programme alongside a vendor with a long footprint in Malaysian telecom and cloud means the curriculum gets pulled toward practical case studies rather than slide-deck theory. The trade-off is the optics of one vendor sitting next to the regulator on a workforce programme of national scope, an issue MCMC will probably need to manage as the cohorts scale.
Who graduated
The 126 graduates from cohorts two and three include MCMC commission members, government officials and senior industry executives. The ceremony drew MCMC commission members Prof. Dr Mohamad Salmi Mohd Sohod and Dato' Sri Dr. Chee Hong Leong, MCMC managing director Abdul Karim Fakir Ali, and Huawei Malaysia's deputy chief executive of Enterprise Business Group, Du Xianjun, alongside vice president of Huawei Asia Pacific Enterprise Sales, Zac Chow.
Takeaway
By itself, 126 leaders is a small number. Cumulatively, the programme is the kind of slow-build human infrastructure that Malaysian digital policy needs more of. The next few cohorts will show whether DLE turns into a real talent pipeline or stays a ceremony series.