The Anchor Tenant Fallacy

The signing ceremony is not the strategy. The governance distortion that follows is.

By Yaschin Mohabir · 7 September 2026 · 10 min read

When Samsung Electronics shifted a significant share of its manufacturing out of Vietnam's export processing zones in 2019, three zones in Bac Ninh and Thai Nguyen provinces lost their single largest tenant category overnight. The zones did not close. But occupancy rates dropped, secondary suppliers began to exit, and zone administrators spent the following two years renegotiating master plans that had been built around one company's footprint. The lesson was not that Samsung was disloyal. The lesson was that the zones had let one tenant's preferences become their strategy.1

The real risk is not departure. It is distortion.

I see the same logic operating across zones in the Gulf, Southeast Asia, and East Africa. Zone developers chase a single large tenant, celebrate the signing ceremony, and then quietly build everything around that tenant's operational requirements. Road alignments, utility contracts, incentive schedules, permitting timelines: all of it shaped by one company's preferences. By the time a second investor arrives, the zone has already been designed for someone else. The economic concentration risk is real but it is the obvious problem. Everyone understands that a zone generating 60 percent of its revenue from one tenant is exposed if that tenant relocates. What gets far less attention is the governance distortion that precedes the departure by years, sometimes by a decade. Anchor tenants do not simply occupy land. They negotiate. They negotiate utility pricing, road access priorities, and which regulatory waivers apply to their operations. Over time, a large enough tenant accumulates informal influence over zone operating rules that was never granted to them formally. Zone management begins, often unconsciously, to filter every subsequent investor inquiry through the question of wheth...

What the data actually says about anchor concentration and long-run zone performance.

UNCTAD's 2021 World Investment Report analysed the long-run performance of SEZs across 63 countries and found that zones with diversified investor bases, defined as no single investor or sector accounting for more than 25 percent of zone employment, demonstrated significantly more resilient value-added growth over ten-year periods than anchor-concentrated zones.2 The correlation held across income groups and geographic regions. Diversification was not merely a risk management choice. It was a performance predictor. This matters because zone developers routinely present anchor tenant attraction as the proof of concept that will then attract a diverse tenant base organically. The sequence rarely works that way. What typically happens is that the anchor's gravitational pull attracts its own supply chain, which deepens sectoral concentration rather than alleviating it. The zone looks full. The investor mix is narrow. The zone authority's performance metrics, occupancy rate, total investment committed, jobs created, all look strong. The underlying fragility is invisible in those metrics until the anchor's board approves a relocation. The Vietnam case is instructive precisely because t...

For developers, investors, and policymakers, the diagnosis is the same but the action is different.

For zone developers, the anchor tenant strategy is a marketing success and a strategic liability. The signing ceremony generates press coverage. The governance distortion happens quietly, in the room where utility pricing gets negotiated at midnight. Developers need to ask whether their zone operating agreements contain any clause that limits the regulatory influence a single tenant can accumulate. Most do not. The absence of that clause is not an oversight. It is the result of a negotiating dynamic in which the zone needs the anchor more than the anchor needs the zone, and both parties know it. For investors entering a zone where one company already dominates, the risk is not just commercial. It is procedural. If the zone's land use rules, permitting timelines, and utility priorities have been shaped around an incumbent, the incoming investor is operating in a regulatory environment that was not designed for them. The questions to ask before signing: who negotiated the zone's current operating rules, when, and under what commercial pressure? What concessions were made to the anchor that are not available to subsequent investors? What is the zone's stated policy on regulatory pari...

The diversification trigger and the structural separation that makes it work.

The centrepiece of a more honest investment attraction strategy is what I would call a diversification trigger: a binding threshold written into the zone's primary enabling legislation, not into a policy document that can be quietly revised, that prevents any single investor from accounting for more than 25 percent of zone employment, land area, or utility offtake at the end of the zone's third operational year. The sequencing matters. First, the threshold must be in primary legislation. If it can be waived by a ministerial letter, it will be. The political economy of managing a large investor who is threatening to relocate is stronger than any internal policy commitment. The threshold needs to be in a document that requires a formal legislative process to change, so that the cost of waiving it is visible and public. Second, the trigger must apply prospectively, which means zone developers need to model their tenant pipeline before signing anchor agreements, not after. The pipeline model should demonstrate how the zone reaches the 25 percent threshold by year three, not just how it fills the anchor's land allocation. Third, the threshold should be accompanied by a disclosure requi...

The day the anchor's board approves a relocation, you will have eighteen months.

The question is not whether you have a retention strategy for that conversation. The question is whether, in the years before that conversation, your governance structure allowed one company's preferences to become your zone's operating logic, and whether every investor who came after them has already decided that the product is not worth the premium. Pull out your zone's operating agreement with your largest tenant. Find the section that covers utility pricing, road access priorities, and regulatory waivers. Ask whether those terms are available to every investor in the zone or only to the tenant who negotiated them. If the answer is the latter, ask what mechanism exists to prevent that tenant from using those terms as a basis for influencing the zone's operating rules going forward. If there is no mechanism, you have an anchor tenant problem. The departure risk is the visible part of it. The governance distortion is the part that is already costing you investors you will never know you lost. The zones that manage this well are not the ones that avoided anchor tenants. They are the ones that built the governance structure before the anchor arrived, so that the anchor's influence...