Singapore’s transborder industrialization projects in China and India have received much attention. This regionalization initiative was intended to set in place a strategic configuration for the city-state to restructure its domestic industries and, pari passu, retain important linkages with contiguous, low-cost environments. Our study reports on Singapore’s pioneering, albeit lesser-known, project - Batamindo Industrial Park – in neighboring Batam Island, Indonesia, and finds that the strategic intent of this policy gambit remains stymied by non-economic, socio-political complexities in the host environment, and the economics of competition from other industrial estates in the vicinity of this prototype, remains to be addressed.