Surbana Jurong builds new campus in Jurong Innovation District

Singapore

URBAN and infrastructure consultancy Surbana Jurong is building a new campus for its global headquarters in the upcoming Jurong Innovation District. The groundbreaking ceremony for the 68,915 square metre development was held on Friday.

Surbana Jurong Campus, as the building is named, will be completed by 2021 and can accommodate up to 4,000 employees. Its location in the Jurong Innovation District - planned to be home to advanced manufacturing, urban solutions and smart logistics firms - will facilitate collaborations with research & development and capability developers, startups and technology enablers.

The new campus is also close to Nanyang Technological University (NTU), with which Surbana Jurong set up the SJ-NTU Corporate Lab in 2018, with the support of the National Research Foundation. Some of the urban solutions research projects being developed in the lab will be trialled in the new campus and then commercialised, said group chief executive officer Wong Heang Fine.

Mr Wong highlighted that Surbana Jurong is itself undertaking the new building's design, development, engineering and management services, in "a testament of how far the company has come".

The campus is designed, for instance, by Safdie Surbana Jurong, a partnership established in 2017 with renowned architect Moshe Safdie.

It also follows sustainable design principles such as a "super-low energy building", featuring green technologies such as solar panels and smart lighting, and uses productive construction techniques such as digital modelling and precast materials.

The new campus is being fully funded by an investment of about S$400 million from M&G Real Estate, a global financial solutions provider for real estate investors. Under the develop-and-lease model, it will be developed by Surbana Jurong's investment arm Surbana Jurong Capital on a land parcel acquired by M&G Real Estate.

Upon completion, the development will be fully leased by M&G Real Estate to Surbana Jurong for the entire land lease tenure.

The investment is part of M&G Real Estate's Asian property strategy and marks its first business park office investment in Singapore.

M&G Real Estate chief executive officer and chief investment officer for Asia Ng Chiang Ling said the development represents a high-quality investment for its insurance and pension customers, and hoped it would be "the first of many things" that M&G Real Estate and Surbana Jurong can partner on. Separately, Boustead Projects announced that its wholly-owned design-and-build subsidiary Boustead Projects E&C had secured the contract to build the new campus. Worth over S$200 million, the contract takes the group's order book backlog up to S$747 million.

The contract is not expected to have a material impact on Boustead's profitability, earnings per share (EPS), and net tangible asset value per share for the current financial year ending March 31, 2019. However, it is expected to have a positive material impact on profitability and EPS for the following two financial years.