India’s state-run refiners will fully commission the world’s longest liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) pipeline by June, a key development that will sharply cut fuel transportation costs, and help prevent deadly road accidents.

“This will be a game changer in the LPG supply chain,” N Senthil Kumar, the director of pipelines at Indian Oil Corp, said in an interview. “It’s like putting LPG on a conveyor belt.”

The US$1.3 billion (RM5.8 billion) project will likely replace hundreds of trucks that travel across the length and breadth of the country to move the fuel from refineries to bottling plants, raising the risk of accidents.

A tanker overturned in Coimbatore last month, bringing the southern city to a partial halt. In December, 20 people were killed, 45 injured, and three dozen vehicles damaged, after a truck hit Indian Oil’s vehicle in the northwestern city of Jaipur.

Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum Corp and Hindustan Petroleum Corp have jointly formed IHB to lay the 2,800km-long pipeline from Kandla on the west coast to the northern city of Gorakhpur. The first phase will be commissioned in March, and will be fully operational from the middle of this year, said Kumar, who is also the chairman of the joint venture.

The network will be capable of annually transporting about 8.3 million tons of LPG, or about 25% of India’s total demand. It’s likely to significantly reduce transportation costs in the world’s third-largest consumer, as about 70% of bottling plants still get it by trucks. The country’s Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board has been pushing refiners to build more pipelines to tackle increased volumes, and avoid any major road disasters.

Local use of the fuel, mainly
needed for home cooking, has surged four-fifths over the past decade to 29.6 million tons in the fiscal year ended in March 2024, outpacing a 47% expansion in demand for refined oil products. The spurt in sales has been helped by discounts by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to wean off low-income households from burning polluting biomass for cooking.

The project has been marred by several delays since it was unveiled in 2019, including pandemic-related lockdowns and challenges in sourcing materials for the project due to Russia’s war in Ukraine. India currently has an LPG pipeline network of almost 5,000km.

Source: Bloomberg

Chinese state-backed developers are starting to buy land at a premium again after the government eased limits on home prices to revive a slumping market that has been a drag on the economy for more than four years.

The number of land parcels that sold for at least 20 per cent above the asking price accounted for 37 per cent of deals in 2025 so far, according to a Bloomberg analysis of transactions worth at least one billion yuan (S$184 million) tracked by China Index Academy. That compares with just 14 per cent for all of 2024 and 4.6 per cent in 2023.

Seven out of the 10 transactions in 2025 involved state buyers, including China Resources Land, China Overseas Land & Investment, Poly Developments and Holdings Group, and mixed-ownership firm Greentown China Holdings.

The renewed interest in land deals signals some state-backed developers are betting on an eventual rebound in the housing market, even as sales and prices continue to slide on weak consumer confidence. While not a full recovery, it is the latest sign that China’s property market is stabilising.

Local provinces are facing increased financial pressure due to dwindling land sales in recent years. Government revenue from these transactions plunged 16 per cent in 2024, worsening 2.8 percentage points compared with the previous year.

In response, more cities are encouraging land purchases by easing terms, including relaxing limits on how much profit developers can make selling new homes. Many cities scrapped price guidance in the second half of 2024 to encourage such moves.

“While the land market hasn’t shown a full turnaround, some cities are starting to see red-hot bidding over parcels,” said analyst Xie Yangchun at China Real Estate Information Corp. “That’s because stringent limits on home prices ended last year.”

To be sure, the number of land transactions worth more than one billion yuan is still below pre-downturn levels. Most of the land parcels sold are small, according to China Real Estate Information.

Source: Bloomberg

Singapore is working to turn its western port of Tuas into a “port of the future,” consolidating other ports in the city-state into a massive, fully automated hub incorporating artificial intelligence technology.

Despite its small size, Singapore has developed as a trade hub since the 19th century, leveraging its position as a gateway between East and West. The city-state is a major center for transshipment, transferring cargo from small vessels from nearby countries onto larger ships bound for Europe or the U.S.

Singapore is the world’s second-largest port city by cargo volume. It handled a record 41.12 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in 2024, up 5% on the year, according to the Maritime and Port Authority (MPA).

Although it is behind Shanghai, which reached 50 million TEUs, Tuas’s expansion is expected to boost Singapore’s capacity to 65 million TEUS once the port is completed in the 2040s.

Scale is not the project’s sole objective. It also aims to account for the drastic changes in the environment around ports in recent years, such as environmental and security issues and technological changes. The challenges it faces include how to operate one of the world’s largest ports with minimal staffing and how to defend against sophisticated cyberattacks.

Source: Nikkei Asia