Malaysia's electronics retail, counted building by building

OpenStreetMap records 1440 electronics shops in Malaysia — more than Dubai, more than Taipei, more than anywhere else measured with this instrument. Only 161 of them sit inside a named building. This page shows which buildings, and why the two numbers pull in opposite directions.

The named buildings

A building counts here when the map names it and at least two of the counted shops sit inside it. Where buildings overlap, the smallest one wins, so no shop is counted twice.

Named building	Shops recorded
Sunway Carnival Mall	31
AEON Bukit Mertajam	10
Lotus's	9
Cheras Leisure Mall	6
AEON Kuching Central	6
Aman Central	5
The Spring	5
Sinar Kota	5
Plaza Low Yat	4
Penang Sentral	4
Prangin Mall	4
29 further named buildings hold the remaining 72 shops. They are measured; they are not listed here yet.

How to read this table

Plaza Low Yat is the building Malaysians name when they say electronics. On this table it carries 4 shops. Sunway Carnival Mall carries 31 — nearly eight times as many.

That is not a ranking of where Malaysia buys electronics. It is a ranking of which buildings have been entered into OpenStreetMap shop by shop. A mall that a mapper has walked through floor by floor will always outrank a mall that nobody has.

The same thing happens in Singapore, where Sim Lim Square carries 4 and a shopping centre rebuilt in 2019 carries 18. Two countries, the same pattern, the same day, the same instrument: what the map ranks is mapping effort, not trade.

The other number on this page points the other way. 1440 shops is the largest count of any place we have measured — larger than Dubai, larger than Taipei. Malaysia is mapped street by street and barely mapped building by building: almost nine of every ten shops sit in no named building at all. That is why the country tops one column and sits near the bottom of the other, and it is a fact about the map before it is a fact about the country.

Limits

What this page cannot tell you, stated so the rest can be trusted.

1279 of the 1440 shops sit in no named building at all. Some of them stand on a street; others are inside a building the map has never named. The measurement never retained a building without a name, so those two cases cannot be told apart from here.
This page names buildings, not states. The measurement carries each building's name and its shop count, and nothing that says where in the country it stands. So nothing here claims that a building is in Penang, in Kuala Lumpur or in Sarawak — a name is not an address.
A further 62 shops in the same data carry no country code at all, and are not in the 1440. The state polygon that would name them is cut by the edge of the data extract; the largest group of them is around Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. They are probably Malaysian. They are not counted as Malaysian, because an edge of an extract is not filled in by judgement.
Distance to the nearest station is not on this page. It was measured, and the measurement was wrong: the detector only read map nodes and missed every station drawn as a surface. It returns when it is right, and not before.
This counts what OpenStreetMap records, not what exists. Every figure on this page is a count of map entries, and the table above is the proof that the two are not the same thing.

Malaysia's electronics retail, counted building by building

What the map holds

The named buildings

How to read this table

Limits

Network

Asia Electronics Market

Singapore Electronics Market

Shenzhen Electronics Market

Hong Kong Electronics Market

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