KUALA LUMPUR, March 29 ― More than two-thirds of 5,381 professional jobs offered by multinational companies were filled by locals, InvestKL said today.

The federal investment agency said the jobs were over half of the 10,971 high-skilled regional jobs already on the payroll.

Most of them are highly paid with an average salary of RM9,500 monthly or RM114,676 annually.

"We remain focus on attracting high value and high skilled investments,” its chief executive officer Datuk Zainal Amanshah told reporters at a media briefing here.

Up to last year, InvestKL said it has succeeded in drawing 73 multinational companies into the capital city with up to RM4.5 billion worth of investments.

They account for 41 per cent of the RM11 billion of total investments from 2011 to 2017.

Last year it added 12 MNCs to its list of investors, Zainal said.

Three of them are Fortune 500 companies: France's gas technology giant Air Liquide, global insurer AXA and Givaudan, a leading French company specialising in flavours and fragrances.

Air Liquide recently opened what Zainal called its smart innovative operations centre while AXA moved its business services and information technology hub here. Givaudan has a manufacturing hub in Petaling Jaya.

"This year we aim to attract more MNCs who have access to the digital space and advanced technologies, Internet of Things or Industry 4.0 technologies, such as artificial intelligence, big data analytics,” Zainal said.