This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on July 21, 2025 - July 27, 2025

On July 7, NEXG Bhd (KL:NEXG), formerly known as Datasonic Group Bhd, was granted a six-month contract extension by the Ministry of Home Affairs (KDN) to continue supplying passport documents and polycarbonate biodata pages to the Immigration Department. The company said the extension, for the period from Dec 1, 2025, to May 31, 2026, carries no changes to the contract’s ceiling value, but it did not disclose the value of the extension.

This is the fifth extension granted to NEXG since the original contract expired in November 2021. It has been given extensions of no more than 12 months since the expiry of the original contract, with the shortest being for six months.

Datasonic Technologies Sdn Bhd (DTSB), a subsidiary of Datasonic Group, was first awarded the contract in April 2016 to supply 13.42 million passport booklets over five years. Two years later in April 2018, it was also awarded the contract for polycarbonate biodata pages, for a period of 46 months. The two contracts would have ended in November 2021.

Why the short-term contract extensions? Are they an indication that KDN is not satisfied with NEXG’s performance? If so, it should be made known as the company is a public-listed entity.

If the company is not performing well in any of the metrics required by KDN, it should be replaced with another vendor. Why has the ministry not done so? Are there other considerations besides performance when deciding on a contract extension?

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