PETALING JAYA: Web Bytes Sdn Bhd has launched its Xilnex Retail Tech Experience Centre in Malaysia, within its cafe, Wonders, in PJ Midtown.
The centre offers visitors a fully functional cafe experience, equipped with a range of Xilnex’s flagship solutions specifically for food and beverage (F&B) retailers such as its Self-service Ordering Kiosk, iPad POS, Restaurant Queue Management System, Kitchen Display System and the Live Rack.
Other retail tech innovations include its self-checkout kiosk and Live Display, a retail shelf with a built-in radio frequency identification (RFID) reader that enables shoppers to access detailed information about products on hi-fidelity screen by scanning the RFID tags.
CEO Ooi Boon Sheng said that by having a tech experience centre installed within a real-life café and retail shop, retailers can witness its brand, Xilnex’s retail solutions in action.
He added that this can provide them with the firsthand experience of leveraging the right technology towards transforming their retail business, supporting the growing trend of hybrid stores that combine shopping and dining.
“In addition, we will use the centre to pilot and validate new customer experience models as well as use it as a testbed for our new retail technologies, to develop practical realworld applications and use cases.
“The experience centre, the most important part is that we are trying to run our own technology because we strongly believe that we can’t be pushing technology solutions to our customers without understanding their real actual pain point so in this real actual environment, we run customer engagements, data analytics, put (behavioural intelligence),” he told reporters during the cafe and centre launch recently.
Meanwhile, Malaysia Retail Chain Association deputy president Ken Phua said Malaysia’s retail industry is likely to register a double-digit growth, surpassing the estimated average growth of 9.0% year-on-year (y-o-y).
“Although 9% is a little bit moderate in terms of estimation but we will go pass the (double) digit percentage growth y-o-y retail growth,” he added.
In terms of ringgit, he noted that there was a “slight” devaluation of the currency which he reckoned was due to the consumption pattern and revenge spending behaviour of Malaysians post-pandemic, such as travelling and buying foreign vehicles which affected or “depressed a little bit of our ringgit in exchange for foreign currency”.
“But this is not going to be in for long because indirectly the government, on a big picture has directed a lot of FDI such as in the first quarter of this year, have attracted US$70 billion into this country,” he said.
GD Express Carrier Bhd (GDeX) owns a 38% stake in Web Bytes, which is a cloud-based retail management software company.
Since 2015, Xilnex has expanded its presence beyond Malaysia to Singapore, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Canada and Australia.
