Description of Project
The client is a special purpose vehicle (SPV) established to promote and stimulate the economic and social development as well as the private sector investment for a regional corridor agency in Malaysia. The client is the project owner and sponsor for various socio-economic initiatives.
Full Story
The project site is conceived to be a premier deep-water port, located within the vicinity of the east coast of peninsular Malaysia. Realizing the huge potential from the port’s accessibility and connectivity to Asia Pacific and beyond, the client is aspired to develop a Master plan that will guide the development of a regional port city as an integrated logistics and industrial hub.
Due to the sizable land area, a proper zoning, land-use and infrastructure planning was needed to achieve a balanced and sustainable development for the port city. In addition to that, funding was another challenge as it involved various large scale to-site and on-site infrastructure.
Scope of Services
The client had appointed us as part of a 20-team set of multidisciplinary consultant team to develop a masterplan for the port city, which involved more than 15,000 hectares of land.
The scope of work includes business feasibility assessment, review of industry outlook, resource scoping, spatial planning, transportation & infrastructure planning, as well as investable project brief preparation, supported by economic analysis.
Key Outcomes
The team begun with a thorough baseline analysis on the project site from physical, economic and social perspectives. The engineering team carried out extensive data collation and analytics on the land and soil situation, topology and hydrology of the site, as well as the current infrastructure available to ascertain the physical constraints in developing the port city. Concurrently, the economist team looked at the local populace, labour combination, income level, economic activities and ecosystem within the vicinity. The outcome of this initial baseline analysis is a comprehensive situational assessment which gave a clear picture of the development opportunities and constraints.
This followed by an international benchmarking exercise which looked at the various successful port city developments around the globe, to synthesize the winning-strategy adopted in the top-notch port city. A filtering mechanism was developed to help the project team in identifying suitable port city developments for the benchmark exercise. The outcome of this is a list of success factors in the benchmarked developments, including key design principle, focused industry sectors, investment strategy, operating model, and possible adaptation into the current port city development. This formed a good basis for the master plan of our development.
The economist team looked at the economy ecosystem within the vicinity to identify the potential economic sectors that could be leveraged on, by adopting a multi-angle opportunities identification framework which look at local resources (ie. feedstock availability, berth size and water depth), infrastructure availability, import and export opportunities, regional and global trending, and competitor landscape (ie. neighbouring port city). This has led to the analysis on potential industry players or investors, as well as the possible negotiation strategies.
With the baseline analysis, benchmarking and economic analysis findings, the team proceeded to develop the draft Master Plan for the port city. A full-day visioning and strategy workshop were being held with the key stakeholders including project owner, relevant authorities, state government, and potential investors of the port city, to agree on the project vision, and key design principle for the port city. With these as the foundation, the team developed a regional port city master plan which covers the land-use, zoning, key components, traffic plan, and other key development components.
Upon the completion of the draft master plan, the quantity surveyors and economist team conducted a financial feasibility assessment using a high-level 30 years financial models which simulate the financial profile for the investment. Various development scenarios were considered in the sensitivity analysis, to assess the optimal option from the perspective of land-use and life-cycle cost. Further to the financial analysis, our team had also computed the high-level socio-economic impact including job creation, GDP contribution and investment values from the port city development.
In the last phase of the project, we helped the client to design an implementation structure which consists of the possible PPP (public-private-partnership) model, roles and responsibilities, as well as the budgeting paper to request for necessary approvals. By the end of the project, we were able to deliver a comprehensive port city master plan that is both technically and financially feasible.
