Study Visit Note 21 March 2019 East Malaysia Study Trip East Malaysia Theme Play, The Next Big Bet? By Adrian Ng l
[email protected] ; Nor Nazirah l
[email protected] Recently, we made a study trip to East Malaysia covering Kota Kinabalu, Kuching, Bintulu including the Samalaju Industrial Park to investigate the progress of on- going developments as well as potential prospects in the above-mentioned cities. During our trip, we visited key players for meetings with their management and conducted site visits to Borneo Highway PDP, SURIA, GBGAQRS, Sarawak Energy, CMS, NAIM, KKB, BIPORT, SERBA, PMETAL, and OM Sarawak. On the Pan Borneo Sabah highway which consists of 35 work packages in total, we foresee delay in the execution due to lingering issues like land acquisitions, relocations, and work coordination. As for updates on the Sarawak Pan Borneo highway; it is currently progressing with more traction at an overall progress of c.35% which we deem to be encouraging for a mega project with limited resources and logistic challenges. An interesting observation we gathered during our trip to Sarawak is the state government’s support in growing their local companies. Hence, we believe that local Sarawak players like Sarawak Energy, BIPORT, HSL, CMS, NAIM, and KKB could benefit from Sarawak state government’s effort in improving the livelihood of Sarawakians. It was also highlighted in today’s news that the Federal government will take over Pan Borneo from the existing PDP. We believe that it would have minimal impact to the existing work package contractors for Pan Borneo Sarawak as most of the work packages are awarded and progressing well, but it could further impact the timeline for Pan Borneo Sabah as it some of the work packages are not awarded yet.