An industrial park is judged in its worst week, so I run ours for the curtailment, the failed contractor and the dry season before they arrive.
I am chief operating officer of Selvanta Industrial Parks Limited, a fictional Singapore-listed company that develops and runs industrial parks in Vietnam and Indonesia. We own five parks covering 2,050 hectares, at Hai Phong, Bac Ninh and Dong Nai in Vietnam and on Batam and near Semarang in Indonesia. Our 286 tenants mostly make electronics, components, packaging and consumer goods, and about 190,000 people work inside our gates. In 2025 the group earned S$684 million from long-term land leases, rent on ready-built factories and warehouses, the power, water and estate services we provide, and a data-centre campus on Batam.
My responsibility is the physical business: building factories and infrastructure on time, keeping power and water flowing, treating what tenants discharge, and sending home uninjured the 9,000 or so contractor workers who are on our sites on a busy day. I lead about 1,180 of the group's 1,450 employees. I came to the role as a builder rather than a landlord. I trained as a civil engineer in Surabaya, spent ten years on a Singapore contractor's sites and five building data centres, then ran our Vietnam parks from Hanoi for four and a half years before becoming COO in January 2021.
I write field notes because most of what I know was learnt on a particular day in a particular place: a fabrication yard that fell silent in East Java in 1998, a substation control room in Bac Ninh in June 2023, a warehouse roof on Batam in March 2024. Each one taught me that a park is judged by tenants in its worst week, not its best year. My work is to prepare for that week before it comes, and to tell our board plainly what the preparation costs.
Eighteen factories finished after the contractor left
When our main contractor abandoned the third phase of the Hai Phong park in late 2022, we terminated, paid unpaid subcontractors where the contract allowed and completed the work ourselves in seven packages. Sixteen factories were handed over by October 2023 and the last two in January 2024, for US$80.4 million against a US$71 million contract.
Power kept on for the processes that could not stop
During northern Vietnam's electricity shortage in mid-2023 we rationed supply by process criticality instead of equally and rented 36 MW of standby generation. Since then we have added 41 MWp of rooftop solar and a 20 MWh battery, and the northern parks can now carry about 31 MW of critical load through a grid outage.
Lost-time injuries down by two-thirds
After a scaffolder died at our Batam park in March 2024, we halted work at height in all five parks for nine days and took the most dangerous permits out of contractors' hands. The lost-time injury frequency rate, counting contractors, fell from 0.92 per million hours in 2023 to 0.31 in 2025.
A data-centre phase sized to the island's water
We offered our Batam cloud tenant 36 MW of new capacity cooled by air-cooled chillers, not the 60 MW evaporative design it asked for. The first 18 MW was energised in July 2026, and the phase is designed to draw less than 120 cubic metres of water a day.
Current focus
I am preparing the board's decision on the second phase of our Central Java park, where the real question is not how many hectares to open but how much grid capacity, water and wastewater treatment we can commit before the first tenant signs. I am also extending our curtailment schedules and our permit system to tenants' own fit-out contractors in every park.
Conversations I welcome
I am committed to Selvanta and not looking for another executive role. I would consider one independent directorship at a listed company in Singapore or elsewhere in ASEAN that builds or operates large physical assets, joining its risk or sustainability committee. I can give about twenty-five days a year, with my board's consent and after a conflicts review, and I accept occasional invitations to speak to owners, operators and contractors.
