Agrobank Announces 2017 Agrobank Agropreneurs Awards Winner

KUALA LUMPUR – Agrobank today has announced 2017 winners of the Agrobank Agropreneur Awards, honouring entrepreneurs who are successful in agri-businesses. Eight (8) main winners from 8 categories received the awards from YB Dato’ Sri Ahmad Shabery Cheek, Minister of Agriculture and Agro-based Industry. More than 300 guests attended the event in Kuala Lumpur, which was held in conjunction with Agrobank’s 48th year anniversary.

According to YBhg Tan Sri Mohamad Zabidi Zainal, Chairman of Agrobank, among the objectives of the Awards are to highlight successful agropreneurs* who can be icons or models for other entrepreneurs of the industry and encourage more entrepreneurs to venture and build successful agri-business. “The Agrobank Agropreneur Awards is introduced to support the Ministry of Agriculture and Agro-Based Industry’s (MOA) initiatives to highlight more success stories in agri-business. Many people still associate agriculture with 3D perception – Dangerous, Dirty and Difficult. But many entrepreneurs in this industry showed that the business outlook for agriculture is promising with continuous demands from local and international market,’ said Tan Sri Mohamad Zabidi.

“Agrobank is proud with the achievement of agropreneurs who work hard to improve their businesses/projects from subsistence level to commercial and export levels. We are proud of our clients who are committed not only to better their lives but also the lives of others in their community. Many of the award winners this year make significant impacts of creating job opportunities and they are also passionate to contribute in creating more successful entrepreneurs as well,” said Tan Sri Mohamad Zabidi further.

According to Tan Sri Mohamad Zabidi, agriculture has always been an important economic growth for Malaysia. Since its establishment in 1969, Agrobank has been supporting the ambitions of many agropreneurs to build their business empires and providing job opportunities to thousands of people. He further added that many entrepreneurs has benefitted from the financing, products and services from Agrobank over the years. During his speech, Tan Sri Mohamad Zabidi also highlighted that the prospects and outlook for agriculture is good. “For the first half of year 2017, Agrobank has recorded impressive achievement the highest financing value with RM9.0 billion. RM5.6 billion of the total is financing for primary agricultural sector and RM 3.4 billion is financing in the agro-food segment. This is a commendable achievement particularly in current global economic condition,” added Tan Sri Mohamad Zabidi.

There are eight (8) categories of the awards; which are the Young Agropreneur Award, Micro Agropreneur Award, People With Disabilities (PWD) Agropreneur Award, Woman Agropreneur Award, Innovative Agropreneur Award, Loyal Customer Award (Individual and Company) and Excellent Agropreneur Award, Agropreneur Award. The award recipients brought home trophies, certificates and cash prizes amounting to RM140,000.00.

The assessment of award winners was based on the instruments developed by the Malaysia Productivity Corporation (MPC) with input from Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) for improvement in assessment.

*Agropreneurs refers to entrepreneurs in agribusiness; either in the upstream or downstream activities in agriculture.