Gresik is a small industrial town of fewer than 100,000 people, just to the north of Indonesia’s second-largest city, Surabaya in East Java. But its position is critical. It sits near the Lombok Strait, the second most important shipping gateway between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea and the vital trade route for fuel and resources between China and Australia.
That is why AKR Corporindo has picked Gresik for what it hopes will become one of East Java’s biggest seaports and the only one tied directly to an industrial estate. The Indonesian logistics group has a 2,500-hectare site and has invested Rp675bn ($70m) of a projected Rp7tn-Rp8tn in the first phase of the development of both facilities.
One of the most notable things about this investment is where AKR got the money: Asia’s local currency bond markets. These markets have their roots in the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 but they have bloomed since the global financial collapse of 2008 unleashed easy money.