KUALA LUMPUR (Oct 4): The total cost for the procurement of the PerantiSiswa Keluarga Malaysia initiative amounts to RM385.31 million for the supply of 350,000 units of tablets, said Communications and Multimedia Minister Tan Sri Annuar Musa.
Each tablet comes with genuine accessories such as keyboard, stylus pen, casing, two-year warranty, post-sales support service, device management platform and manufacturer's device management software.
“As of Sept 23, 2,764 students from the Ministry of Higher Education, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture Malaysia have received the tablet device,” he said in a parliamentary written reply.
Annuar was responding to a question by Kulai Member of Parliament (MP) Teo Nie Ching, who wanted to know the number of devices distributed under the PerantiSiswa programme and its cost.
In August, four companies won contracts worth RM335.22 million in total from the federal government to supply tablets for students from B40 households, under the PerantiSiswa Keluarga Malaysia initiative.
According to the Ministry of Finance (MOF)’s government procurement information centre MyProcurement, Synerlitz (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Etika Info Sdn Bhd, SNS Network (M) Sdn Bhd and Uptrend Technology Sdn Bhd were chosen as winners, based on the centre’s tender decision update dated Aug 3.
The four companies will distribute the tablets according to four different geographical zones in Peninsular Malaysia.
The government allocated RM450 million under the PerantiSiswa Keluarga Malaysia initiative, which was announced under Budget 2022.
The procurement committee had selected the Samsung brand as winner of the open tender, involving five suppliers and five different zones, namely Sabah and Sarawak in the first zone, as well as the northern, central, eastern and southern zones.
The distribution of the PerantiSiswa tablets, which was initially scheduled for June 2022, had been postponed due to technical factors in the procurement process.