The Port of Tanjung Pelepas (PTP) is a container port in Iskandar Puteri, Johor, at the southern tip of peninsular Malaysia, on the eastern bank of the Pulai River estuary where it opens into the Strait of Johor across the water from western Singapore. It handled about 12.3 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) in 2024, making it the 15th busiest container port in the world in Lloyd’s List’s ranking and Malaysia’s second busiest after Port Klang. Inaugurated by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad on 13 March 2000, it was built to compete with Singapore for transshipment cargo, which makes up more than 90 per cent of its traffic, and it now handles more containers than any port in Europe except Rotterdam and Antwerp-Bruges.
Who Built and Owns Tanjung Pelepas: Ayob Mion, MMC and Maersk
The port began as a Johor state idea. As the state government planned a new urban centre at what was then called Nusajaya, now Iskandar Puteri, the then State Secretary, Dato Ayob Mion, proposed a new port on Johor’s west coast. The site chosen lay near the Malaysia–Singapore Second Link, the bridge between Tanjung Kupang in Johor and Tuas in Singapore that opened to traffic on 2 January 1998 and runs 1,920 m over the water. The bridge itself was a product of cross-border cooperation: it was formally opened on 18 April 1998 by Mahathir and Singapore’s Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong. The port, by contrast, was aimed squarely at Singapore’s own harbour, and it drove industrial development in the Tanjung Kupang area, a mukim (parish) of about 115 km² with a population of 10,702.
Ownership reflects the politics of Malaysian privatisation. The operating company, Pelabuhan Tanjung Pelepas Sdn Bhd, is 70 per cent owned by MMC Corporation, a Malaysian infrastructure conglomerate whose ports division also runs Johor Port, Penang Port, Northport and Tanjung Bruas Port, and which handled a combined 15.8 million TEU across its ports in 2018. Its sister port on the other side of Johor Bahru, Johor Port at Pasir Gudang, is the world’s largest palm oil terminal, so MMC runs major ports on both the western and eastern sides of Johor Bahru. A minority stake in the joint venture belongs to APM Terminals, the terminal arm of the Danish shipping group Maersk, and PTP is part of APM Terminals’ global terminal network.
MMC’s largest shareholder, with 51 per cent, is the businessman Syed Mokhtar Albukhary, born in Alor Setar, Kedah, on 12 December 1951. He left school before finishing his final year when his family’s cattle business collapsed, built a fortune in rice trading in the 1970s, and in the 1990s bought into listed companies and state enterprises during Mahathir’s privatisation drive. In 2001 he acquired a 19.9 per cent stake in MMC, and he later became its controlling shareholder. Government-linked investment companies hold over 30 per cent more of MMC, so the public sector keeps a substantial indirect interest in the port.
66 Cranes and 498 Prime Movers: The Working Port at Gelang Patah
The port sits in the southwestern part of Gelang Patah, a town about 30 km from Johor Bahru, Malaysia’s second-largest city. Its scale is best measured in machines. PTP has 14 berths along 5.1 km (3.2 mi) of continuous wharf, with water depths of 15 to 19 m and a turning basin 720 m across. Those berths are worked by 66 super post-Panamax quay cranes, 24 of them with an outreach of 24 container rows; behind them, 174 rubber-tyred gantry cranes and 498 prime movers shuttle boxes around a 120-hectare container yard that can store about 240,000 TEU, with 48,374 ground slots and 5,080 reefer points for refrigerated containers. Total capacity is put at more than 12.5 million TEU a year, and the port has been ranked the fifth most efficient in the world.
Because more than 90 per cent of its cargo is transshipment, most of that equipment moves containers from one ship to another rather than out of the gates. For the rest, the port has road links to Johor Bahru and a four-track rail terminal on the peninsula’s freight railway, which runs north through Malaysia to southern Thailand. The port area covers 810 hectares, with another 610 hectares set aside for a free trade zone. A 2007 master plan went much further, envisaging more than 95 berths and 150 million TEU of capacity strung along the shore from the mouth of the Pulai River to the Second Link.
Volume has grown roughly threefold in two decades. According to Lloyd’s List figures compiled on Wikipedia, PTP handled about 4.0 million TEU in 2004. It passed 8 million in the mid-2010s, reached 11.2 million in 2021, dipped to about 10.5 million in 2022 and 2023, and then jumped to about 12.3 million in 2024.
The port’s best-known departure was an unlucky one. The Ever Given, a 400 m ship with a capacity of 20,124 TEU, was sailing from Tanjung Pelepas to Rotterdam when she ran aground in the Suez Canal on 23 March 2021, blocking the waterway for six days and leaving hundreds of ships queuing at either end.
Seagrass, Mangroves and Dugongs at the Pulai Estuary
The costs of the port fall most heavily on the estuary beside it. The Pulai River runs from Mount Pulai in Kulai District to Tanjung Pelepas, where it drains into the Strait of Johor. The river is a mangrove forest reserve and a Ramsar site, recognised as a wetland of international importance, and researchers from the University of Technology Malaysia and the National University of Malaysia have studied it to support an integrated management plan for Johor’s mangroves.
At the river mouth lies the single largest seagrass bed in Malaysia, stretching out to Pulau Merambong, a small, uninhabited mangrove island about 1 km off the coast of Tuas in Singapore. Dugongs and seahorses feed on the seagrass, and sea turtles use the area too. Environmentalists have raised concerns that the development of the port threatens this habitat and the animals that depend on it, and there have been plans to gazette Merambong as a nature park, with environmental groups offering to fund it. Further west along the same coast, the mangroves of Tanjung Piai in Pontian District mark the southernmost point of mainland Eurasia and are also a Ramsar site. There, erosion of the mangrove shoreline is a recognised problem that the site’s managers are required to minimise under the Ramsar Convention, and the site has a high socio-economic value for fisheries. The southwest Johor mangroves also act as a natural barrier that protects inland villages and farmland from storms, including tsunamis.
The port is not the only pressure. About 3 km away lies Forest City, a 1,370-hectare property development on reclaimed land, announced in 2006 and formally opened on 6 March 2016. It is a joint venture in which the Chinese developer Country Garden holds 60 per cent and a Johor state-linked company 40 per cent. Marketed mainly to buyers from China, it saw sales collapse after Beijing tightened currency controls and was described as a ghost town in 2022; it has also been criticised for large-scale habitat destruction nearby. Since 2024 the government has designated it Malaysia’s first tax-free special financial zone in an effort to revive it.
A different environmental problem surfaced in June 2020, when 110 containers holding about 1,864 tonnes of toxic electric arc furnace dust, a steelmaking waste, were found at the port. The Malaysian government said it would work to repatriate the waste to its country of origin.
Singapore Next Door: Who Gains from 12.3 Million TEU
Tanjung Pelepas was built to take business from its neighbour, and its location makes that competition unusually direct. The Johor–Singapore Causeway, opened in 1923, cuts the Strait of Johor in two, and its lock channel was permanently closed after the Second World War, so large ships reach the western arm of the strait, beside the Pulai estuary, from the west. PTP sits on the Malaysian side of that western entrance, close to the southern end of the Strait of Malacca, the main shipping channel between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Singapore remains far larger, the world’s second-busiest container port, but PTP’s growth shows the pull of new, deep berths right beside that sea lane. The beneficiaries are spread widely: Johor, which now has the highest GDP of any Malaysian state outside the Klang Valley and hosts Iskandar Malaysia, the country’s largest special economic zone by investment value; MMC and its owner; Maersk’s terminal arm; and the Malaysian government through its linked investors. The costs fall on a narrower group, the mangroves, seagrass and dugongs of the Pulai estuary, and the residents of Gelang Patah, a town that has shifted from a shantytown to a hub for foreign companies but has seen its living costs rise.
For the other side of the rivalry, read our guide to the Port of Singapore, then compare the narrow waterway both ports share in our Strait of Johor guide, or follow the Ever Given’s route west through the Suez Canal.