Both air and sea transport continue to play a vital role in Asia's geographically-fractured economic and social ecosystem. Countries that have invested heavily in trade infrastructure and opened their logistic hubs to foreign investors have since reaped the benefits of global trade.
For instance, both Indonesia and Thailand have disclosed their ambitions to strengthen sea trade infrastructure to tap on burgeoning shipping volumes accessing a congested Straits of Malacca. As for air travel, Thailand's main airport operator, Airports of Thailand, has announced plans for the expansion of six of its main airports due to their high utilization rates caused by a boom in passenger traffic. These expansions will cost over $5.5 billion and will eventually allow Thailand's airport network to serve 150 million passengers a year in 2030, up from 72 million passengers now.44
China, the world's second largest economy, is forecast to raise investment in its airport infrastructure construction beyond the level of the transportation sector over the coming five years. This is in line with investment intentions and strategy under the country's 13th Five Year Plan (2016-2020), with plans to build 74 new civil transport airports by 2020, bringing the total number to 260 by 2020. It is estimated that China's total annual flight hours will rise to 2 million hours by 2020.45