Is Corporate Innovation Key to Capital Market Industry Sustainability? Evidence from Delisting Hazard of Malaysian Companies

Abstract

The year 2011 saw the launch of the National Innovation Strategy and Capital Market Masterplan 2 in Malaysia, underlining an increasingly important national agenda of innovation-led growth. As the Malaysian capital market is expected to face greater challenge to expand its market size against the backdrop of growing international competition, market capitalization growth needs to be internally driven. However, the market has seen large delisting flows and underperformance of new listings in recent years, and inadequate corporate innovation may play a role. Using reported R&D expenditure as indicator for corporate innovation, we apply formal survival modelling technique onto corporate financial data of Malaysian Public Listed Companies (PLCs) to investigate the impact of innovation on public listing duration of companies. We find that innovative PLCs face lower delisting hazards when controlling for market capitalisation and sector classification. A PLC with positive reporting of R&D expenditure would face merely 15.8-17.8 percent of the hazards of a non-R&D company, and the marginal benefit of an additional ringgit spent on R&D is most significantly felt by Malaysian PLCs classified under the Technology sector, followed by asset-rich PLCs predominantly in the Plantation sector. There is also evidence that the quality of new listing pipeline in Malaysia has indeed declined over the years. Non-innovating mid-cap companies are also found to face the largest delisting hazards, followed by non-innovating small-cap companies, calling for more effective corporate innovation reporting to reduce information risk faced by investors.