Ask why an anchor manufacturer struggled at a new site and the answer is rarely the building. It is that the castings came from eleven hundred kilometres away, the tooling shop had a six-week queue, and every batch of harnesses crossed a customs boundary on the way in.
The fix is unglamorous. An estate has to be dimensioned against the bill of materials of the industries it is trying to attract, and then priced and sized for small and medium enterprises rather than for corporations — from ten thousand square feet upward, with shared yard, shared crane provision and shared heavy services.
When tier-two suppliers sit inside the same free zone as their customers, goods move between them without customs formality, without duty and without port transit. For a just-in-sequence delivery model that is the difference between a viable operation and an impossible one. It is also the difference between an estate that fills and an estate that stays half-let.
