From timber to tech Sibu's spotty transition to joining Sarawak's booming economy

SIBU, Sarawak - On the hour-long cruise along Sibu's waterfront, a recorded audio commentary boasts that the town once had more millionaires than anywhere else in Borneo, thanks to the post-war timber boom.

- Shannon Teoh Malaysia Bureau Chief

It seems an unlikely story, because the town on the banks of the Rajang, Malaysia's longest river, does not exude the glitz and glamour one would expect from a tycoon's playground. Rustic traditional structures sit incongruously next to modern shophouses two- to three-storeys tall, with the odd skyscraper towering over them.

The entire Sibu district in East Malaysia's Sarawak state is triple the size of Singapore but is home to just a quarter of a million people.

The townscape reflects the start-stop nature of efforts to industrialise this central outpost in Sarawak, leaving Sibu to fall behind other cities in the state and the rest of Malaysia, and in danger of becoming a forgotten town.

"The enterprising people that made Sibu – their children are being encouraged not to come back because there's nothing, no opportunities here,” Sarawak Chamber of Commerce and Industry's vice-president for the Sibu region Jason Tai Hee told The Sunday Times.

He added that for "a place like Sibu", which has been in the doldrums since its prime years in the 1970s and 1980s, you “need a very strong catalyst" to reverse its fortunes.

No less than the head of Sarawak's government concurs. In a visit in August 2023, Premier Abang Johari Openg was reported as saying that Sibu has been dependent on timber for too long, and with climate change making forest conservation a priority, the district now "has no anchor economic activities"

The state government is in the early stages of a decade-long plan to revitalise the entire central region of Malaysia's largest state. Plans are for Sibu to be the third town to achieve city status in Sarawak, after state capital Kuching and Miri.