Most people thought that when Delapan was coined, it was the act of a few old men, holding their hands and randomly pointing to a place on a map, blindfolded. However, Delapan was not a coincidence, but it is the next evolution of Bukit Kayu Hitam. Just five kilometres from Delapan, a giant American company set up shop in 1998, and that company is Boeing. Boeing arrived at Bukit Kayu Hitam via a joint venture with Hexcel dubbed Asian Composites Manufacturing Sdn Bhd (ACM). Yes, we will admit that one of the reasons Boeing chose to set up its manufacturing facility in Malaysia was that Malaysia Airlines (MAS) was, and still is, an important user of Boeing jets. In 1996, before the opening of ACM in Bukit Kayu Hitam, MAS announced that it had ordered 29 Boeing Business Jets (BBJ) and became the first BBJ operator in Asia at that time (please read as BBJ, not BJ or BBC). But why Kedah, particularly Bukit Kayu Hitam? The reason for Boeing at that time was straightforward: ten minutes from the Malaysia-Thailand border (diversified supply chain) and less than two hours via road to Penang Port, one of the key deep-sea ports in the region. The logic that led Boeing to choose Bukit Kayu Hitam still applies to Delapan today.
At one point, ACM became the world’s sole producer of aileron composites for the Next-Generation 737 commercial jetliner. Before that, it was already the sole producer of fixed trailing edge and leading edge composites for the 737, 747, 757, 767, and 777. In 2024, Boeing decided to double down its bet in Bukit Kayu Hitam by taking over ACM and renaming it Boeing Composites Malaysia (BCM), the company’s first wholly-owned manufacturing facility in Southeast Asia.
Boeing took 25 years to go from a joint venture in a Kedah border town to making it their first wholly-owned manufacturing subsidiary in all of Southeast Asia. That’s not incidental; it signals how seriously Boeing treats Malaysia as a manufacturing base, and it’s a strong narrative anchor for what Delapan can become as the zone matures around it. My point is, Delapan is not some greenhorn development. It is built around a mature ecosystem, and it is up to Delapan to decide what its anchor industry should be. The aerospace cluster is the legacy anchor. The real action now is logistics and industrial; BKH-ICD is live, NCT InnoSphere is under development, and the data centre plays are positioning Delapan as a digital corridor. Plenty of angles Delapan can go from here.
If you follow our social media this week, we highlighted that there are 19 key tertiary education institutions within a 50km radius around Delapan, with Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) and Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP) as the flagship institutions, completing the triple helix model of what makes an industrial hub work: the government, academia, and industry itself. But, if I am being honest, I think Delapan specifically and Bukit Kayu Hitam generally are missing one key thing: making Delapan a place where workers actually want to stay and work. A great place to work and stay must have three things: leisure, good healthcare, and good education.
Delapan has education covered, of course, with 19 institutions within a 50-kilometre radius, and there are plans to develop healthcare and leisure facilities within our planned area, Pentas Industrial City. But I want to take this opportunity to explain why leisure, healthcare, and education are important things to have near an industrial hub. As a developer of an economic hub such as Delapan, apart from developing the local talent pool, you also want to attract high-skilled talent from other parts of the country. Building schools and hospitals is a no-brainer, but building entertainment centres is a point of contention, based on my experience dealing with some state governments in Malaysia, for religious or cultural reasons. However, a healthy indicator of a good economic hub is its ability to attract young and talented individuals, and this group of individuals needs some escape, and one of the ways is by having an entertainment centre. Entertainment may not just be pubs; it can take the form of concert halls and the like. One state understands the importance of good education, healthcare, and entertainment better than others, and surprisingly, it is not Johor, but it is Sarawak.
Sarawak did not become the benchmark by accident. It made deliberate bets on talent, on liveability, on the kind of ecosystem that makes people choose to plant their roots rather than just clock in and clock out. That is exactly the conversation Delapan needs to be having right now. The land is there. The infrastructure is coming. The institutions are already within reach. What Delapan needs to build next is not just factories and warehouses, but a reason for the best people in the region to want to be here. Boeing did not stay in Bukit Kayu Hitam for 25 years because of cheap land. They stayed because the fundamentals were right and kept getting better. That is the bar Delapan has set for itself. The question is whether we are bold enough to clear it.
