State Tourism, Trade and Consumerism Committee chairman Tee Siew Kiong said last year some 6.95 million tourists visited Johor, compared with 6.4 million in 2014.

“The increase helped to make the state as the one with the biggest increase in tourists last year,” he said in a reply to Hamimah Mansor at the state assembly on Sunday.

Tee added that in 2015, the state attracted about 4.39 million domestic tourists and 2.56 million foreign visitors, compared with 4.02 million local and 2.4 million foreign tourists in 2014.

He said a variety of tourism products catering for all age groups also helped to lure more visitors to the state.

He added that the average hotel occupancy rate also increased by 1.9 per cent to 58.5 per cent in 2015.

Tee said the state government, through Johor Tourism, had intensified promotion activities by organising Explore Johor programmes and Fam-trips involving media and outside tour agents.

Meanwhile, Johor executive councillor for education and entrepreneur development Md Jais Sarday said the state government hopes to increase the number of fair-price Koperasi Iskandar Malaysia Berhad (imCoop) outlets from four now to 150 by the end of the year.

He welcomed the participation of other cooperatives to help open up more imCoop outlets.

“At the moment, we have the participation of 96 cooperatives with some 60,000 members statewide,” he said.

He said the cost to open an imCoop outlet is about 400,000 ringgit (US$102,552) to 500,000 ringgit, and it can attract about 400 customers per day with sales of 8,000 to 10,000 ringgit per day.

“Sales can shoot up to about 17,000 ringgit a day at the end of the month,” he said in his reply to questions from Adam Sumiru (BN-Tanjung Puteri), Abd Taib Abu Bakar (BN-Machap) and Ayub Jamil (BN-Rengit).

imCoop, which was launched in November last year, sells about 2,000 items and the state government hopes to increase this to 6,000.

Md Jais stressed that imCoop is not in competition with traditional sundry shops and it wants to provide goods at reasonable prices to help consumers cope with the rising cost of living.

He added that sundry shops can also get their goods from imCoop’s warehouse in Kulai.

(US$1 = 3.90 ringgit)