THE SUSTAINABILITY OF BUMIPUTERA-OWNED SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES FACING COVID-19: DEAD OR ALIVE!

The emerging of the deadly mysterious disease stirs peacefulness and creates the domino effect around the nations. Known as Coronavirus disease 2019 or COVID-19, this infectious disease caused by a novel coronavirus that hazardous to human respiratory system, sending the borderless possibility of death wreath warrant to them. COVID-19 is not only placing health systems under unprecedented pressure in saving human life, the pandemic also caused local and international economics as well as their businesses suffered to their last breaths. The impacts of COVID-19 are unbearable as businesses seize their operation temporarily or completely dissolve, causing people to lost their job without steady income. In addition, the developments of physical effects of infection and the mental trauma creating stress, fear, confusion, lonely and anger among people because of self-isolation or social lockdown in their own homeland. Indeed, the disease also squeezed small and medium enterprises (SMEs) around the world, particularly in Malaysia into a dramatic consequence of losing their business sustainability and capability of competing in the red ocean market. Bumiputera-owned SMEs for instance, facing difficulties in maintaining their business livelihood during the pandemic lockdown and movement control order (MCO). This paper accentuates the sustainability and survival acts among Bumiputera-owned SMEs in Malaysia in facing COVID-19 as recommendation to elevate their economic life. Moreover, COVID-19 should serve as a wake-up call for everyone in heightening multilateral collaboration across communal conversion of shared dilemmas without looking the pandemic as rigorously belongs to the public health domain.