What running an industrial park actually asks of its operator

Selvanta spends between S$250 million and S$420 million a year building roads, drainage, substations, treatment plants and ready-built factories, mostly through fixed-price design-and-build contracts with Vietnamese and Indonesian main contractors. I have sat on both sides of those contracts, about thirteen years with contractors and fifteen with owners, and I organise our delivery around the way contractors actually fail: slowly, through cash, and visibly to anyone who looks below the main contract. Since 2023 our monthly valuations test payment to a rotating sample of subcontractors, compare daily gate counts by trade with the contractor's resource plan and track suppliers' credit terms. On contracts above US$20 million we pay through a project account that settles listed subcontractors directly. I also keep an in-house project team large enough to step in, about 60 engineers and quantity surveyors. Our finance colleagues call it expensive insurance. After Hai Phong in 2022, I call it the price of keeping tenants' production dates.

In our parks we buy electricity at high voltage and distribute it through our own substations, treat raw water for tenants and treat their wastewater before it is discharged under permits from provincial authorities. Utilities and estate services earned S$148 million of our 2025 revenue at a modest margin, but they decide whether a manufacturer stays. I manage them against three measures that the board sees each quarter: unplanned interruption hours per tenant, the share of critical load we can carry through a grid outage, and wastewater compliance results park by park. Interruption hours fell from 9.4 per tenant in 2022 to 2.1 in 2025. Every lease now carries a curtailment schedule that ranks loads by safety and process criticality, verified by our engineers rather than declared by tenants. We have added 41 MWp of rooftop solar and a 20 MWh battery in the north, and we are assessing renewable supply under Vietnam's 2024 rules on direct power purchase agreements.

On a busy day about 9,000 contractor workers are on our sites, employed by dozens of firms with very different habits and working under Vietnamese and Indonesian law. I hold that the owner, not each contractor, must control the activities most likely to kill someone: work at height, lifting, excavation, live electrical work and entry into confined spaces. Since 2024 Selvanta has issued those permits itself in every park, to one standard written in Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonesia and English, and no contractor's own permit substitutes for ours. Every worker on our sites may stop work, and a hotline in four languages is answered by our safety officers at any hour; it was used 140 times in 2025. Beside injuries, I report leading indicators to the board: high-potential near misses, permit audit failures and stop-work calls. Our lost-time injury frequency rate fell from 0.92 per million hours in 2023 to 0.31 in 2025, contractors included.

Five years delivering data centres for Halcyra taught me how critical facilities should be commissioned: integrated systems testing under simulated load, with chillers, generators and switchboards failed deliberately before a customer accepts a hall. I brought that practice to our Batam campus, where Selvanta provides the building, the grid connection and the central cooling plant and our cloud tenant fits out the data halls. The first 24 MW building was energised in 2022. For the second phase I argued that capacity should be sized to the island's water and to our substation, not only to the tenant's request. We chose air-cooled chillers that consume almost no water, accepting a higher expected power usage effectiveness of 1.38 against 1.27 for the evaporative design, and losing the 24 MW the tenant then built in Johor. The board now sees water use beside power efficiency, because either figure alone hides the trade.

Our parks run under two legal systems, with three languages in daily use and very different provincial practices, and head office is always tempted either to impose one manual or to let each park invent its own. My rule is to standardise whatever protects people and tenants and to let the country teams decide the rest. Permits for dangerous work, curtailment schedules, wastewater sampling and response times to tenant faults are the same everywhere. Procurement, community programmes and working relationships with each province belong to the country teams. In Vietnam I replaced three expatriate park general managers with Vietnamese colleagues between 2017 and 2020, and all five parks are now led by managers from their own country. Estate services, from security and road maintenance to dormitory inspections, are run in-house in Vietnam and through one performance-based contract in Indonesia, because the local service markets differ; tenant satisfaction scores in the two countries are now within three points of each other.