JW Sam

JW Sam, the CEO and founder of tech firm Socoe, is leading the digital revolution in his home state of Sarawak in East Malaysia. Returning home in 2017 after leaving at 16 to study—which led to an extended stay abroad to work as a strategy consultant for lifestyle luxury businesses in the USA, New Zealand and Hong Kong—Sam initially joined his father’s property development company, RH Group.

The business management and politics graduate later founded Socoe to help digitise small businesses in Sarawak through mobile app development and integration with an online platform. The apps created by Socoe include i-Alerts, Sarawak’s official disaster communication and information app; enterSarawak, an app designed to make entry to Sarawak easy and hassle-free for travellers; and ePreneurs, a platform for local entrepreneurs to showcase their products to a wider audience. Socoe also runs SarawakCare, an app which helps ease the application process for government assistance.

After only a year since Socoe’s founding, JW Sam’s company received the Malaysian Technology Excellence Award for 2019 from Singapore Business Review. Then, in 2020, it became the first Sarawakian company to win at the Asia Pacific Enterprise Awards (APEA), winning the Fast Enterprise Award in recognition of its rapid growth.