Lelo Nxumalo

Is it better to be smart or connected? In the world of Malaysian corporate finance, the answer might be "both." Continuing with the theme of corporate connectedness, I have calculated various measures of network structure in Malaysia's listed companies to see if "social capital" translates into financial returns. I focus here on two metrics: Degree: Simply the number of shareholders a company has. Think of this as raw popularity. PageRank: Named after Google co-founder Larry Page, this algorithm ranks websites by importance. I applied this to the network of cross-shareholding to determine the quality of connections. A company owned by a major player (like Khazanah) gets a higher PageRank than one owned by obscure holding companies. Figure 1: Visualizing the relationship between connectedness and returns. The graph above confirms my h...

This is a follow-up to my previous analysis of Malaysia's corporate ecosystem. While the last post looked at which companies own each other, this post zooms in on the people . Using the same dataset, I mapped Interlocking Directorates —the extent to which individuals sit on the boards of multiple listed companies. This metric is often used to spot power brokers, conflicts of interest, and the "old boys' network" that directs the economy. Figure 1: The web of Interlocking Board Memberships (2015). Larger nodes = Individuals on more boards. The "Super-Connector" Anomaly The visualization highlights some extreme outliers in the data: Max Board Seats: As of 2015, the most connected individual wa...