For a business in southern Malaysia that ships abroad, the gap between a factory floor in Johor and a cargo plane in Singapore is starting to matter less. FedEx has begun treating the two sides of the Johor to Singapore border as one connected route, and it recently walked reporters from Malaysia and Singapore through the whole run to show how a parcel makes the crossing.
The tour followed the path a FedEx shipment takes from the company's facility in Senai, Johor, through border clearance, to its South Pacific Regional Hub in Singapore. It comes as the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone, the region's first cross-border special economic zone, takes shape across southern Johor.
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Inside the FedEx Johor to Singapore run
The Senai facility is the starting point. Opened in 2019, the combined warehouse and sorting site handles up to 1,600 packages an hour and serves exporters and manufacturers across southern Malaysia, including electronics and manufactured parts for industries such as automotive and marine.
From there, up to six trucks leave Senai on a working day, connecting exporters in the south to onward air services through the Singapore hub. The facility feeds the FedEx Asia Road Network, a 3,800-kilometre road system linking Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. Woon Tien Long, Managing Director of FedEx Malaysia, led the Malaysian leg of the visit.
Why the corridor matters now
Johor is doing a large share of the country's trade. The state accounted for 19.8 percent of Malaysia's exports and 22.3 percent of its imports in 2025, ranking second and third among all states, and it recorded the second-largest export increase in the country at RM12.6 billion. That is the same southern belt now drawing major infrastructure investment, from logistics sites to data centres.
The border itself is heavily used. The Johor to Singapore crossing is one of the busiest land border crossings in the world, and Malaysia and Singapore were each other's second-largest trading partners in 2024, with bilateral trade of US$78.70 billion as of October 2025. Paperwork on that route has been getting lighter: since January 2025, traders need only a single transshipment permit from Singapore Customs for land intermodal transshipments instead of the two required before, which Singapore's Economic Development Board says cuts processing time by half and saves S$40 per permit application.
For online sellers, the same corridor is the physical layer under a fast-growing market. Southeast Asia's e-commerce is on track to keep climbing for years, and cross-border delivery is what turns a listing in Johor into a sale overseas.
Automation at the Singapore hub
The run ends at the FedEx South Pacific Regional Hub in Singapore, where road and air operations meet. The hub uses an AI-powered sorting robot, introduced in 2022, whose robotic arm can sort up to 1,000 packages an hour, carry up to 5 kilograms at a time and cover up to 100 destinations at once, with an accuracy rate of more than 99.5 percent. Eric Tan, Managing Director of FedEx Singapore, set out how the ground and air sides connect there.
The practical takeaway for exporters and online sellers in the south is simple: two countries that already trade heavily with each other are being stitched into one delivery route, with fewer handoffs between the Johor factory and the Singapore runway.
