Did this ‘pineapple town’ in Johor fabricate modern, glitzy Singapore?

SINGAPORE/JOHOR – Drive for an hour past Tuas Checkpoint, beyond the hilly golf resorts and the yawping theme parks, across humid hectares of plantation and pineapple farms, and you will arrive at an unvarying row of concrete Lego bricks, each the size of a bedroom.

In that same hour, these slabs of precast rooms are lifted and loaded onto trailers. They then leave Aurum Precast factory in Johor’s Pekan Nanas – meaning “pineapple town” – and snake past the Second Link to a Singapore construction site. There, they join other identical slabs, stacked atop one another to make the next glitzy condominium project.

Most Singaporeans might not have heard of Pekan Nanas. Once famed for its pineapple plantations, the sleepy town still houses a quaint museum dedicated to the fruit with South American origins.

Yet nearly everyone would have stepped into a building or a structure that was first fabricated in the fertile, spacious surroundings of this small town.

Pupils attending the National Day Parade at the Padang, tech workers in Punggol Digital District, commuters on the Thomson-East Coast Line and families in a Jurong West Housing Board flat have all unknowingly stepped into a “Made in Pekan Nanas” structure.

Prefab in Pekan Nanas, fab in Singapore

“We send around 30 loads of delivery a day, but we’ve recently been sending more, as there is a surge of projects in Singapore,” says Aurum’s quality assurance and quality control manager Mohd Fitri Abdul Karim on a tour of the 17ha production and storage area, which is about 1.6ha larger than the plot of land Marina Bay Sands sits on.

Organised by Singapore-based heritage group My Community, the tour is one of seven day trips it organised across the Causeway in August to allow participants to better understand the ties between the two countries.

Now one of Johor’s biggest precast suppliers, Aurum was established in 2014 as a subsidiary under Woh Hup, the home-grown construction and civil engineering firm responsible for iconic buildings such as Golden Mile Complex (formerly Woh Hup Complex) and Tuas Checkpoint.

With more than 800 workers and a dormitory on-site, most of Aurum’s precast parts are not used locally but exported for use in Singapore.

At the 348-unit Woodlands condominium Norwood Grand,

which has 495 sq ft units priced from $988,000, one of these precast rooms takes about two hours to be hoisted.

A maximum of five such modules – its technical name is Prefabricated Prefinished Volumetric Construction (PPVC) – are added a day, says a project manager.

Precasting at a centralised factory in Johor, instead of casting the units on site, contributes to about 30 per cent in productivity savings. It also generates less waste, dust and noise. This can be an advantage for projects like Norwood Grand – which is located next to Innova Primary School.

At another side of Aurum’s Pekan Nanas factory, curved concrete segments are stacked in neat rows like a brutalist stockpile. They are the puzzle pieces of what will become the tunnels that trains pass through, in this case, for Phase One of the anticipated Cross Island Line, slated to open here in 2030.

When eight of these tunnel segments are pieced together, they form a ring with a 6m diameter – the tessellated shapes that can sometimes be glimpsed from the front of a train. For Loyang MRT station, which Aurum is working on when The Straits Times visits, 1,736 such rings are needed.

Surrounded by sprawling plantations, Aurum is not the only precast company in the area. There are others such as SPC Industries and Greyform too.

A subsidiary of local construction giant Straits Construction Group, Greyform also runs an integrated construction and prefabrication hub (ICPH) in Singapore – multi-storey, high-tech factories which use automated systems to produce precast components.

Once touted as the future of construction,

ICPHs have been reported by ST as struggling with storage issues and competition from Malaysia

.

With local supplies of precast components at or near optimal production, HDB has had to ensure more flexibility for suppliers to tap local and foreign precast plants, as some 55,000 BTO flats are expected to launch from 2025 to 2027 to meet the demand for new flats.

Singapore’s fab requires Pekan Nanas’ – and writ large, Johor’s – prefab.

Shakespeare and Roald Dahl, made in Pekan Nanas

Some of the most elaborate theatrical spectacles in Singapore are made no further than a nine-minute drive from Aurum Precast. Without Pekan Nanas, large-scale local and international productions might not get staged here.

At the high-ceilinged and sprawling Arina Hogan Builders, sets by local theatre groups Pangdemonium and Singapore Repertory Theatre (SRT) have been built. Singapore does not have a place big enough to build

the 14m-tall sets demanded of SRT’s Shakespeare In The Park

,

and so Pekan Nanas plays home to the architects of theatrical visions.

Technical consultant Marc Andre Therrien and scenic designer Natalie Chung – the husband-and-wife duo behind several editions of the show, including the most recent Macbeth – are based in Singapore and Pekan Nanas.

Their favourite set to work on was The Tempest (2015). The set was a 14m-high open book, which took Chung more than a month to paint.

Arina Hogan Builders will also build the set in Pekan Nanas for

the highly anticipated stage adaptation of British children’s author Roald Dahl’s The BFG (Big Friendly Giant) that will open at the Esplanade Theatre in 2026

, says SRT’s managing director Charlotte Nors.

“This is a huge coup for Singapore. One of the key reasons we have been able to achieve this is being able to assure our partners that Arina Hogan will build the set here when we present the show in April,” says Ms Nors. The show is a co-production by SRT, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), Chichester Festival Theatre, Roald Dahl Story Company (RDSC) and Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay.

It all comes full circle as Mr Richard Tan, who runs Arina International Holdings, went to Stratford-upon-Avon in 2005 to learn how to build the touring set for RSC’s production of King Lear starring Sir Ian McKellen. SRT and Esplanade co-presented the production in Singapore in 2007.

Non-theatre projects listed on Arina Hogan’s website include the $1.5 million purpose-built Singapore Badminton Hall in Geylang Lorong 23, which opened in 2011, and the $2 million KF1 Karting Circuit at the Singapore Turf Club in Kranji, completed in 2014.

Mr Therrien, who started working for Arina Hogan about two decades ago, remarks: “It’s a pineapple village, but there are fewer pineapple plantations as it has been supplanted by palm plantations, which are now being taken over by industrial factories.”

Asked what he does in Pekan Nanas for leisure, Mr Therrien says wryly: “Nothing. You work.”

When not seduced by Johor Bahru’s megamalls, tourists from Singapore might journey westwards to Nictar Pineapple Park, where guided tours and a bevy of pineapple products supplement the income of the farm.

But Pekan Nanas’ namesake could eventually become a thing of the past

as East Malaysia’s Sarawak ramps up its

pineapple production

. As land use for industrial and precast activities competes with pineapple farming in Johor, history continues to repeat itself. After all, it was Johor which continued to produce pineapples after Singapore’s cultivation export peak tapered off in the 1930s.

“The best pineapples in Johor”

In many ways, Pekan Nanas supports land-scarce Singapore’s ambitions. A newly inked Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone (JS-SEZ) is likely to underscore that relationship.

Dr Serina Rahman, a lecturer of South-east Asian studies at the National University of Singapore, who studies artisanal fishermen and Johor-Singapore borderland issues, thinks it would be good if the JS-SEZ can bring more business to parts of diverse Johor beyond Johor Bahru.

Citing the fact that the Singapore-Johor relationship has always been a partnership of combined strengths since pre-colonial times, Dr Serina says: “Perhaps we can support the development of more prefabricated environment projects in Pekan Nanas and other industries in other parts of the state with things that Singapore is good for – technology, logistics, marketing.”

In December, Malaysia’s Ministry of Investment, Trade and Investment named Pekan Nanas in Johor as a strategic location within the JS-SEZ.

Malaysian English-language daily The Sun reported that the ministry noted that Pekan Nanas has “more competitive land and operating costs compared with Iskandar Puteri and Johor Bahru to make it an attractive alternative”.

Aurum – apart from building for Singapore – has started building precast parts for data centres in Malaysia as Johor becomes the fastest-growing data centre hub in South-east Asia, partly because of a spillover from Singapore.

While larger industries have so far been seen as the beneficiaries of the JS-SEZ, Dr Serina believes there are more opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to benefit from: “Only if local businesses get a boost will they be more supportive of this initiative.”

A mindset shift, too, is needed for Singaporeans to perceive its relationship with Johor beyond that of Singapore as a giver of business and Johor as a taker. “From what I see in the media, some Singaporeans seem to think that the SEZ will benefit only Johor, as if Singapore is fully sufficient and complete by itself,” says Dr Serina.

Aptly for Dr Serina, who visits Pekan Nanas often, her view of the pineapple town goes beyond the obvious glam and fabricated images. “They have nice nurseries, coffee shops – and the best pineapples in Johor.”