Chief Operating Officer / Singapore / Southeast Asia
Four hard weeks and the decisions they forced
- Group revenue, 2025
- S$684m
- Land leases, ready-built rent, utilities and estate services, and data-centre rent
- Tenants across five parks
- 286
- In Vietnam and Indonesia; about 190,000 people work in the parks
- Lost-time injury frequency rate, 2025
- 0.31
- Per million hours worked, contractors included; 0.92 in 2023
Decisions & consequences
01Finishing eighteen factories after the main contractor walked away
In January 2022 we awarded a US$71 million fixed-price design-and-build contract for the third phase of our Hai Phong park: eighteen ready-built factories totalling 162,000 square metres. Eleven were pre-leased to electronics and component makers, with handovers due between April and June 2023 and rent-free compensation for lateness in their leases. By August our site team was hearing from welders and steel erectors that they had not been paid for weeks. The contractor blamed a labour shortage. In November, with Vietnam's corporate-bond market frozen and its residential clients unable to pay, it stopped work. About 38 per cent of the phase had been built.
Three options reached me. Our Vietnam country director and our chief financial officer favoured novating the remaining work to the second-ranked bidder, which quoted US$51.5 million, excluded defects in the existing work and could not start before April 2023. Our general counsel preferred to wait for the contractor's talks with its lenders. I recommended terminating, paying unpaid subcontractors directly where the contract permitted it and finishing the phase ourselves in seven trade packages. The CFO's objection was fair: we would give up fixed-price certainty and carry the risk at every interface between packages. The board approved my recommendation with a US$8 million contingency.
We deferred the second phase of our Central Java park by six months and moved fourteen engineers and quantity surveyors to Hai Phong. On legal advice we paid 23 subcontractors US$3.2 million for certified work the contractor had left unpaid, which brought most crews back. I worked from the site office for much of early 2023 and telephoned each waiting tenant.
Sixteen factories were handed over by October 2023 and the last two in January 2024. The final cost was US$80.4 million, close to what novation would have cost, but about four months sooner. Two tenants withdrew, releasing 19,000 square metres that we re-let by mid-2024, and the others received US$1.1 million in rent-free months. Contracts above US$20 million now pay through a project account, and monthly valuations test payment down the chain.
I would act on the first unpaid subcontractor, not the fourth. And I would use four packages rather than seven: the roof and building-services interfaces between packages produced most of our later claims.
Rationing power by process during northern Vietnam's 2023 shortage
In late May 2023 the state utility began rationing electricity across northern Vietnam, after a dry season left hydropower reservoirs low and thermal plants short of coal. Our Hai Phong and Bac Ninh parks, with 104 tenants and a combined peak demand of about 212 MW, received curtailment notices of up to 30 per cent, often with two or three hours' warning. Our substations could switch feeders, so we could choose which tenants lost power. Nobody had agreed in advance how we would choose.
On the first day our northern team spread the cut evenly across feeders, which was simple and looked fair. Within 24 hours a cable maker had lost a curing-oven batch and a packaging tenant's cleanrooms had taken most of a shift to recover. I asked our engineers to rank loads overnight: safety and environmental loads protected first, then continuous processes, then batch processes, with assembly and warehousing curtailed first. Our commercial director and the Vietnam country director opposed the ranking. They argued that it exposed us to accusations of favouritism and that no lease gave us a basis for it. They were right on both counts. I judged that equal sharing would do more harm.
We also rented 36 MW of diesel generators for seven weeks, at US$4.8 million including fuel, and recharged the cost at no margin, in proportion to the standby capacity each tenant received. Two tenants complained formally about the ranking. One threatened legal action and settled for a US$140,000 credit after reviewing our load data. After the first two days no continuous-process tenant lost a batch.
The board then approved a S$58 million resilience programme. By the end of 2025 we had 41 MWp of rooftop solar and a 20 MWh battery at Hai Phong, and the northern parks could carry about 31 MW of critical load through a grid outage, against none in 2023. Every lease and renewal now includes a curtailment schedule that our engineers verify and rehearse with tenants twice a year. Three tenants have since cited that summer when choosing our parks for later plants.
I would write the ranking into leases before a shortage, not during one. I would also have monitored air quality around the generators from the first day: workers' dormitories stood within 300 metres of two sets, and we began measuring only in the third week.
Halting work at height in five parks after a death on Batam
On 12 March 2024 a scaffolder employed by a subcontractor fell nine metres through an unprotected roof edge on a ready-built warehouse we were building at our Batam park. He died in hospital that night. He was 27 and had worked on our sites for two years. The subcontractor had issued its own permit for the work, and our main contractor had countersigned it without going onto the roof.
That evening I decided to stop all work at height in our five parks until each site had been inspected against a single standard. Our Indonesia country director argued for stopping only on Batam: the other parks used different contractors, and a group-wide halt implied failures we had not found. Our data-centre tenant, two weeks from finishing a fit-out, asked to be exempted. Manufacturers with fit-outs in progress were not obliged by their leases to stop and had to be persuaded. I kept the halt group-wide because the underlying failure, a contractor approving its own risk, existed in every park.
The halt lasted nine days and covered 37 of our own projects and 12 of 14 tenant fit-outs. Delay costs and contractor claims came to US$2.1 million, and three handovers to tenants were late. We cooperated with the police and with Indonesia's manpower inspectors, supported the man's family beyond what the law required and kept the subcontractor's other workers on full pay while they were retrained.
We then took control of the most dangerous permits. Selvanta now issues permits for work at height, lifting, excavation, live electrical work and confined spaces in every park, to one standard in three languages, and we added 26 safety officers to issue and audit them. Every worker may stop work, and a hotline in four languages takes those calls. The lost-time injury frequency rate fell from 0.92 per million hours in 2023 to 0.31 in 2025, and there has been no fatality on our sites since.
I would change two things. We wrote the restart criteria during the halt, which is why it took nine days rather than five; they should exist before anyone needs them. And we began bringing tenants' own fit-out contractors into the permit system only six months later, work that is still not finished in every park. That delay was my decision, and it was the wrong one.
Offering a cloud tenant 36 megawatts instead of the 60 it asked for
Our Batam park includes a data-centre campus. Its first building, providing 24 MW of IT load to a global cloud provider, was energised in 2022 and earned S$47 million of rent in 2025. In mid-2024 the tenant asked for a second phase of 60 MW, using the evaporative cooling design it uses in cooler markets. At full load that design would have drawn about 1,400 cubic metres of water a day and taken our park to within a few per cent of its allocation from the island's water operator. Batam depends on a few rain-fed reservoirs, and our 47 manufacturers there use about 6,900 cubic metres a day.
Our chief executive and commercial director wanted to accept the request as designed. Full build-out would have earned about US$11 million a year more in rent than any smaller option, and a campus in Johor was courting the tenant. I recommended offering 36 MW with air-cooled chillers on a closed loop, topped up with recycled water from our own wastewater plant. That design uses almost no water but more electricity: its expected power usage effectiveness is 1.38 against 1.27 for the evaporative design, and it cost about US$14 million more to build. The tenant's engineers disagreed sharply, because their efficiency commitments are measured in power, not water.
The board debated the choice at two meetings. It approved 36 MW after I set out water projections for the park to 2035 under a dry-year scenario, with and without the larger phase, and showed what each meant for the manufacturers we had promised supply. The tenant signed for 36 MW in March 2025 and placed its other 24 MW in Johor. We agreed a rent that recovers most of the additional chiller cost over the lease term.
The first 18 MW was energised in July 2026, and the phase is projected to use less than 120 cubic metres of water a day. The campus now publishes a water budget, a grid budget and a wastewater budget for each plot before any tenant designs against it, and our board sees water use beside power efficiency.
I would publish those budgets before marketing a plot, rather than after a tenant had designed around assumptions we never shared. And I would bring the island's water operator into the first conversation, not the fourth.