Westports Holdings (Malaysia), Structured Community Engagement at Pulau Indah
Westports Holdings operates container terminals on Pulau Indah in Port Klang, Malaysia. It handled 10.98 million TEUs in 2024 (Westports Holdings, 2025). It is developing eight new container terminals, CT10 to CT17, which will double container handling capacity from 14 million to 28 million TEUs (Westports Holdings, 2025). The port operates on Pulau Indah, where local communities live next to the terminals, and the company states that its social responsibility extends to "the community surrounding the port" (Westports Holdings, n.d.).
Approach
Map stakeholder groups. The 2024 Sustainability Report names eight stakeholder groups: port users, government and authorities, shareholders and investors, community, employees, suppliers, professional bodies, and non-governmental organisations (Westports Holdings, 2025).
Set channels and frequency for each group. For the community group, the report lists the engagement method and how often it is used. Examples are the website (daily), annual and sustainability reports (annually), visits, seminars and joint activities (ad hoc), community engagement activities (regularly), a materiality survey (biennially), and local partnerships with NGOs (ad hoc) (Westports Holdings, 2025).
Record community concerns. The report records the community's key concerns as employment of locals, and infrastructure development and community engagement (Westports Holdings, 2025).
Include communities in materiality. Westports invited port users, government authorities, shareholders, employees, local communities and NGOs to take part in its online materiality survey (Westports Holdings, 2025).
Give departments clear community roles. Human Resources works on education for students in Pulau Indah. The Engineering department repairs houses for families in need and teaches technical subjects. The Port Police handle crime prevention and traffic management on Pulau Indah (Westports Holdings, n.d.).
Results
In 2024, Westports declared that it would allocate a minimum of RM1.0 million a year to develop Pulau Indah and its surrounding areas (Westports Holdings, 2025). Its community page lists 2025 activities including a Back to School Program, a Mega CSR event in Kampung Sungai Pinang, classroom repairs at SKPI, and a food distribution initiative (Westports Holdings, n.d.). The 2024 report does not describe a formal community grievance mechanism or report spending by programme.
Transferability
DMC ports can adopt the same basic structure: list stakeholder groups, set a channel and frequency for each, record each group's main concerns, and include local communities in the materiality survey. A fixed annual community budget tied to the host area, and clear community roles for operating departments, are low cost steps. Ports should also add a published grievance mechanism and report spending and outcomes, which this example does not yet show.
Sources
All information used for this case study was based on publicly available resources.