SIBS’s RM500mil Penang Science Park plant, the Swedish modular builder now ships Penang-made apartments to the UK, Australia and Greenland

On the Penang mainland, a Swedish company builds apartment blocks in a factory and ships them out in boxes. Three years after SIBS opened its second and much larger plant at Penang Science Park (North), the Penang-made modules are going to Sweden, England, Scotland, Australia, Saudi Arabia and Greenland, an export manufacturer choosing Penang for a product that has nothing to do with semiconductors.

What SIBS opened, and where

SIBS — Scandinavian IBS Sdn Bhd, the Malaysian arm of Stockholm-based SIBS AB — formally opened its second Penang plant on 29 September 2022. The company is an industrial producer of apartment buildings: it makes volumetric light-gauge-steel modules, fits them out inside the factory, and assembles them on site, claiming construction timelines up to 40% shorter and costs up to 30% lower than conventional building, with about 90% of the work done offsite.

The new plant sits on 15 acres (about 6.07 ha, or roughly 60,700 sq m) at P25, Jalan PSPN 3, Penang Science Park (North), 14100 Simpang Ampat. Buletin Mutiara put the building at 46,450 sq m — just under 500,000 sq ft of floor area, roughly twice the size of SIBS’s first plant. That works out to about 76% site coverage

Plant 2 — Penang Science Park (North), Simpang Ampat: view on Google Maps

Its first plant, which SIBS still runs, is a few kilometres away at P371, Lorong Perindustrian Bukit Minyak 21, Taman Perindustrian Bukit Minyak — the original Penang Science Park. SIBS set up in Penang in 2016, finished that first factory in 2018, and had it running at full capacity by the end of 2019. It bought the Simpang Ampat land in early 2020.

Plant 1 — Taman Perindustrian Bukit Minyak: view on Google Maps

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The numbers behind the plant

• RM500 million committed over five years in phases, of which the second facility itself accounted for more than RM200 million. On the ~500,000 sq ft building, that first phase is roughly RM400 per sq ft of floor area — a capital-expenditure figure that includes production lines, not a property price, but a useful marker of how much a modern IBS plant costs to stand up.
• Designed for four production lines, two installed at opening and two more planned for mid-2023. Output was to rise to 5,000 apartments a year across the two plants — the new factory alone rated at about 4,000. By 2025 SIBS was quoting a combined capacity of around 6,000 homes a year.
• 1,200 additional jobs — about 80 jobs per acre, or roughly RM417,000 of investment per job — on top of the 850-plus people SIBS Group already employed across its five companies in 2022.
• RM552 million of local sourcing of raw materials and components expected from the expansion — more than the RM500 million capital programme itself.

At the opening, Penang was represented by state exco Datuk Abdul Halim Hussain, MIDA by executive director Najihah Abas, and Sweden by Ambassador Dr Joachim Bergström, alongside SIBS Group CEO Erik Thomaeus and SIBS Malaysia managing director Ong Song Ping. Chief Minister Chow Kon Yeow’s statement was read into the record: “This project will bring in investment, strengthen the socio-economy and increase job creation.” Thomaeus called Malaysia’s devotion to technology and innovation “genuinely attractive for business”.

Three years on: SIBS is doing good

The order book is now overwhelmingly export. From SIBS’s own releases and trade press through late 2025:

• UK: a £28 million (about RM160 million) contract with Donard Real Estate for 245 apartments in Basildon, Essex, with module production in Penang from late 2025, and heads of terms for 134 student-housing units in Edinburgh targeted for 2026 delivery. SIBS puts its UK pipeline above US$300 million.
• Australia: a first order for 50 factory-built secondary homes, to be made in Penang for installation from early 2026, with the partner talking about scaling to 2,000 units a year, plus a 212-room hotel project in Kalgoorlie.
• Greenland: a memorandum with Berjaya Land’s Berjaya Greenland Invest A/S for 66 apartments in eight blocks in Nuuk, GDV RM170 million, with construction from early 2026 and SIBS’s delivery slated for completion by July 2026.
• Saudi Arabia: a 2,200-apartment project completed and a 1,300-apartment project nearing completion — but SIBS also said delayed contract awards there hurt factory utilisation in 2025, which is the honest counterweight: a plant built for 6,000 units a year is sensitive to one big customer’s timing.
• Malaysia: a first pilot modular classroom for a public school with Capsule Technology, and an exclusive staff- and student-housing partnership targeting 100,000 sq m a year, with a first 25,000 sq m project awarded.

SIBS raised more than SEK 600 million of equity in 2025 and is targeting turnover of at least US$300 million in 2026 with profitability at operating level.

The supplier effect, in one filing

The RM552 million local-sourcing promise is not abstract. Oxford Innotech Berhad, a Penang precision-engineering group, disclosed in its July 2025 IPO factsheet that it signed a ten-year supply agreement with SIBS in January 2024 for precision components and assemblies, that SIBS is one of the six customers making up 69.5% of its revenue, and that it is spending RM23.1 million on a second factory at Penang Science Park — a three-storey building with 67,722 sq ft of manufacturing floor and 37,234 sq ft of offices — specifically to meet demand from SIBS, with construction from Q1 2026 and completion in Q1 2027.

The mainland is winning non-E&E export plants. Everything about SIBS’s site choice — highway access, port access via the Second Bridge, cheaper land than the island, PDC as a single landlord — applies to any bulky export product. Modules the size of a shipping container need exactly the large, flat, highway-fronting floorplates that Penang Science Park (North) and Batu Kawan offer.

Cover and inline photos: SIBS, from the 29 September 2022 opening ceremony. Google Maps links point at the published street addresses and are approximate.