ViTrox prepares for mild slowdown while continuing to invest

Doing its part for food security

Before ESG (environmental, social and governance) became the buzzword, ViTrox Corp Bhd had already jumped on the bandwagon long before others followed suit.

ViTrox invested in making sure that its headquarters — the 450,000-sq-ft Campus 2.0 in Batu Kawan Industrial Park, Bandar Cassia — was a green working place. The bricks of the building can breathe, and the roof features solar panels that can generate renewable energy. Rainwater is recycled to water the plants at ViTrox’s organic farms.

Chu Jenn Weng, the company’s managing director, believes vegetarianism is an ideal way to reduce global warming. In a recent interview with The Edge, Chu emphasises that ViTrox will continue to embark on new initiatives for smart farming technologies to do its part for food security.

Early this year, the group, via ViTrox Agritech Sdn Bhd, started a smart farming cluster development in Ara Kuda, where almost one-third of the farmland has been used for prototyping, in the form of either farming technologies or farming automation.

“The land that we leased from the government is about 15 acres, and 30% of the land, or four acres, has been used for the purpose. The aim is to improve the yield of leafy vegetables sustainably and cost effectively,” he notes.

While Chu realises that ViTrox Agritech will not contribute significantly to ViTrox’s earnings in the next three to five years, that will not deter the company from putting in more effort to ensure it is sustainable and profitable.

“Our focus right now is to be able to come up with solutions that are cost effective enough to help farmers to significantly reduce the dependency on foreign workers, overcome extreme weather disruption and eliminate use of pesticides,” he says.

ViTrox has allocated RM25 million over three years, starting from 2022, for this venture.

“Food security will be a big issue in the next 10 to 20 years, owing to climate change. We are working hard to develop workable and cost-effective solutions for our farmers, especially for the micro, small and medium farmer clusters in the country. We also hope to offer our agritech solution to neighbouring countries that face similar problems,” says Chu.

“With innovation and new technology such as semi-autonomous farming equipment, Internet of Things and machine learning, we believe we can attract more young people, especially fresh graduates, to venture into this industry.”