Regions

Fourteen agricultural titles in Kulai converted to industrial use this year

A coordination desk's own tracking register lists 212 hectares changed over since January. Its priority zone note sets an internal planning figure for five districts by 2030 without a district-level breakdown.

By Khairul Anas · 26 July 2026 · 4 min read

Case names, entities and officials in this report are composite and illustrative. References to public bodies describe their statutory role only.

The conversions on record

The Kulai Corridor Conversion Desk, an industrial land coordination office that tracks land-use activity across a five-district corridor remit that includes Kulai, maintains a tracking register of parcels converted from agricultural to industrial use in Kulai. The register lists fourteen parcels converted since January, according to its own entries as updated through 15 July. Each entry records a lot number, the parcel's area and the date a conversion order was recorded against the title.

The fourteen parcels together cover 212 hectares, a figure the register states as its own running total for the year rather than a calculation this desk has made from the individual lot entries. The largest single conversion, lot HSD 4471, covers 38 hectares and was recorded in March.

The register does not state a target number of conversions for the year, and no published schedule sets an expected pace against which the fourteen recorded so far can be measured. The desk's own quarterly summary sheet, the source for the register's running total, carries no comparison to a prior year's count.

From agricultural to industrial

A conversion order changes the category of land use recorded on a title from agricultural to industrial, a distinct step from rezoning under the district's local plan, which sets out permitted uses for an area but does not itself alter an individual title's category. Kulai sits within the Iskandar Malaysia corridor, a designated economic development region in southern Johor; a corridor-level structure plan for the region exists and covers industrial zoning generally, though the figures in this report are drawn from the coordination desk's own priority zone note, described below, rather than from the structure plan directly.

Under standard land administration procedure, a landowner applies for a conversion by lodging a use-change application together with a technical report addressing drainage, access and, where relevant, environmental impact. The coordination desk's own intake checklist, used when logging a completed conversion into its tracking register, records these three supporting documents as typically present in the file it receives.

A conversion order carries a premium, a one-off statutory sum separate from any land tax that applies afterward. The desk's tracking register does not record individual premium amounts against each of the fourteen 2026 entries, listing only a combined premium total logged for the year to date: 4.1 million ringgit.

Who applied

Of the fourteen conversions on the register, ten name a corporate applicant and four name an individual landowner converting a family-held parcel, according to the applicant-type field the register carries for each entry.

Three of the ten corporate applicants are subsidiaries of Tenggara Bina Industrial Sdn Bhd, a Kulai-registered developer that has filed conversion applications in each of the past three years, based on the desk's application index. The three 2026 filings together account for 96 of the 212 hectares recorded on the register.

The remaining seven corporate applicants each filed a single conversion application, none of which the register connects to any of the others by shared director or shared registered address, based on the desk's own applicant record fields rather than an external company search.

One applicant, listed only as 'Lot HSD 4471 Holdings,' does not carry a company registration number in the applicant field, unlike the other nine corporate entries logged in the register.

What the plan says

The coordination desk's own priority zone note, last revised in 2024, sets an internal planning figure of extending industrial-use land by 1,800 hectares across five districts it tracks by 2030; Kulai is one of the five districts named in the note.

The note does not break the 1,800-hectare target down by district, so the fourteen conversions recorded in Kulai this year cannot be checked against a district-level figure the note itself sets.

The note lists three supporting infrastructure items tied to Kulai's inclusion in its tracking scope: an upgraded access road, an extended drainage reserve and a substation capacity increase, each marked in the note's status column as 'in planning' rather than completed.

The desk's tracking register does not cross-reference any of the fourteen 2026 conversions to the note's infrastructure items, and no document in the file states whether the pace of conversion recorded so far this year is ahead of, behind, or in line with what the note's 2030 figure implies.

Fourteen conversions and a combined premium of four million ringgit tells you the activity is real, but until someone lines up each parcel against the coordination desk's own priority zone note, you can't say whether the district is on pace or catching up.