The fourth edition of the ASEAN Rail Infrastructure & Expansion summit, the most exclusive and renowned railway symposium in Southeast Asia, was hosted in Hanoi, Vietnam, on May 30th-31st, 2019. Mahanakorn Partners Group was the event’s advisor, content creator, moderator and Technical Partner. Over a two-day span of intensive learning, debating and networking, the event attracted a large audience of professionals who shared their views on railway development in the Southeast Asia market. Ministries and Government agencies were also represented, and speakers from the Tokyo Metro, the Lao Railways Authority, the Ministry of Public Works and Transport of Cambodia, the Railway Department of the Ministry of Public Works and Transport of Lao PDR, the Mass Rapid Transit Authorities of Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia were featured.
Rapid growth and urbanization in Southeast Asia call for adequate infrastructure and transport services for ASEAN municipalities to cope with the ever-increasing demand for urban commuting and long-distance travel. Southeast Asian countries need to modernize their freight and passenger rail capacity, outspread and improve existing rail infrastructure, expand urban rail transit and realize cross-border railway transportation systems.
Mahanakorn Partners Group’s presentation elaborated on the prevailing PPP arrangement for railways projects, the Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) model, presenting five case studies, namely: the Bangkok Pink and Yellow Monorail Lines, the Bangkok Transit System Corporation (BTSC), the System Transit Aliran Ringan Sdn Bhd (STAR-LRT) in Malaysia, the Manila Metro Rail Transit Line 7 (MRT-7) in the Philippines and the Jakarta Bandung High-Speed Railway in Indonesia. The presentation also examined the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity 2025, with a particular focus on Sustainable Infrastructure, whose strategic objectives are:
– Increasing public and private infrastructure investment in each ASEAN Member State, as needed
– Significantly enhancing the evaluation and sharing of best practices on infrastructure productivity within ASEAN
– Increasing the deployment of smart urbanization models across ASEAN.
MPG’s presentation also examined the types of underlying risks in infrastructure financing, presenting a range of risk management structures.
