By Datuk Ts Dr. Hj Ramli Amir, former President of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT) Malaysia and Vice-President of CILT International for Southeast Asia
KOTA KINABALU: FutureSabah stands at a pivotal moment in its development journey. Ambitions of becoming a regional logistics and connectivity hub are now routinely expressed in speeches, plans, and investment roadshows.
The language is attractive: “hubs”, “corridors”, “gateways”, “BIMP-EAGA integration”. Yet beneath this promising vocabulary lies a troubling reality.
The state’s logistics system remains deeply fragmented, stitched together by ad hoc projects rather than guided by a coherent, integrated transport and supply chain strategy.
In this context, the push for yet another “logistics hub” study risks putting thehorse before the cart – or, more accurately, putting a very expensive cart onto a road network and system that has yet to be properly designed.
At the heart of the problem is a persistent misinterpretation of what Sabah actually needs. For years, logistics planning has too often been equated with infrastructure shopping lists: a port expansion here, a new industrial park there, a proposed dry port or inland depot somewhere inland.
Each initiative is justified on its own terms, backed by local aspirations and political support. What is missing is a unifying logic that ties these investments into a statewide, multimodal system that serves real supply chains from origin to market.
In other words, Sabah is trying to build sophisticated carts without first breeding, training, and harnessing the horse, which is an integrated transport and logistics master plan.
A genuine logistics transformation does not begin with deciding where to place warehouses or terminals. It starts by understanding how goods, people, and information actually move.
In Sabah’s case, this means tracing the journeys of palm oil, cocoa, rubber, timber products, seafood, livestock, manufactured goods, construction materials, and tourism-related supplies from rural and interior production areas through inland towns, ports, airports, and cross-border crossings to their final destinations.
It means examining why cargo moves the way it does today: the overreliance on a few arterial roads, the limited and often poor-quality rural access, the absence of efficient intermodal transfer points, and the lack of visibility and coordination among actors along the chain.
Without this systems view, planning for a “logistics hub” becomes little more than refining the design of one node in an otherwise disjointed network.The conceptual confusion is easy to spot.
When policy makers and consultants talk about “integration”, they frequently mean integration within a site – a port with a logistics park, or an industrial estate with some warehousing – rather than integration across the entire transport system.
A hub, no matter how modern, cannot fix structural issues in hinterland connectivity, regulatory fragmentation, or misaligned corridor development. If the roads, policies, institutions, and digital systems that feed and connect the hub remain inefficient and uncoordinated, the hub simply inherits Page 1 of 3those weaknesses. It becomes an island of relative efficiency surrounded by a sea of systemic inefficiencies.
There is also a serious issue of sequencing. A province or state with a mature, integrated transport and logistics master plan can logically proceed to identify and refine specific hubs, corridors, and projects as implementation tools under that plan.
Sabah is trying to do the reverse: deciding on the nature and location of a “logistics hub” before agreeing on a comprehensive, data-driven framework for the entire transport and logistics system.
This is not just a procedural quibble. The absence of an integrated master plan means there is no accepted statewide hierarchy of corridors and nodes, no clear functional differentiation between ports and airports, and no agreed roadmap for future modes such as rail.
In such a vacuum, every “hub” proposal competes for attention and resources, often without a rigorous assessment of how it fits into the longterm picture.The costs of this approach are not merely theoretical.
Every misaligned investment absorbs scarce public and private capital that could have been used to strengthen critical corridors, improve rural access, or modernise key gateways.
When a new logistics facility is built without a clear sense of its role within a network, it may duplicate existing capacities, cannibalise traffic from other nodes, or underperform because the rest of the system cannot support it.
Over time, this leads to a landscape of underutilised assets, congested bottlenecks, and frustrated users – all of which undermine Sabah’s competitiveness and its ability to attract serious, long-term logistics investment.What Sabah needs instead is an honest reordering of priorities.
The first step should be the development of a robust, integrated transport and logistics master plan that is explicitly multimodal and supply-chain oriented.
Such a plan would map current and future demand, identify strategic corridors and nodes, clarify the respective roles of each port and airport, and outline the required intermodal connections between road, sea, air, and any future rail development.
It would also integrate regulatory, institutional, and digital dimensions from the outset, recognising that logistics performance depends as much on processes and governance as on physical infrastructure.
Within this master planning framework, a “logistics hub” feasibility study still has an important role – but as a second-order task, not the starting point.
The hub would be conceptualised as one of several strategic interventions to operationalise the master plan, not as an isolated solution in search of a problem. Its functions, catchment area, cargo mix, and linkages would be defined in relation to clearly articulated corridors and hinterlands, rather than assumed or negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
Decisions about location, scale, and business model would be guided by network optimisation, not just land availability or local lobbying.
This reorientation also demands a change in mindset among planners, consultants, and commissioning agencies.
It requires moving away from project-based thinking toward systems-based thinking. Instead of asking, “What can we build here to stimulate development?”, the question becomes, “What does the overall logistics system need, and where does this hub fit within that design?” It means accepting that some politically attractive projects may not be justifiable when viewed through a system lens, and that some less glamorous interventions – such as upgrading a rural feeder road, creating a unified digital platform for cargo visibility, or rationalising regulatory overlaps – may deliver far greater impact.
Critically, a proper master plan forces stakeholders to confront trade-offs. Not every district can be a hub, and not every port can be upgraded to the same level. Priorities must be set based on demand, feasibility, and strategic positioning.
Some investments should be sequenced, others postponed, and a few perhaps abandoned. This is uncomfortable but necessary.
Without these difficult choices, Sabah risks spreading its resources too thinly, achieving modest improvements everywhere but transformational change nowhere.
There is, however, a constructive way forward. Current and upcoming “logistics hub” studies do not have to be wasted opportunities. If framed correctly, they can serve as building blocks for the broader integrated transport and logistics master plan Sabah so clearly needs.
This means expanding the scope of such studies beyond site-level design to include comprehensive state-level mapping of infrastructure, networks, cargo flows, and policy frameworks; evaluating hub options across alternative network configurations; and proposing a phased, multi-agency action plan that can be scaled up into a full master plan.
In other words, the same study can be used to start putting the horse and the cart back into the right order.Ultimately, Sabah’s logistics future will be determined not by the number of hubs it can announce but by the coherence of the system connecting its people, resources, and markets.
Getting that system right requires disciplined planning, political will, and a willingness to look beyond short-term project cycles.
It means accepting that the true starting point is not a feasibility study for a single hub, but a serious, integrated reconsideration of how the state’s transport and logistics architecture should evolve over the next two to three decades.
Only when that horse is firmly in place will the many carts – ports, parks, hubs, depots, and digital platforms – have any chance of pulling Sabah’s economy forward in a coordinated and sustainable way.
