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-grownconstruction 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.
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.
Reference : Did this ‘pineapple town’ in Johor fabricate modern, glitzy Singapore? | The Straits Times