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Babies Bought in Indonesia, Approved in Singapore

“Marcus” was months old when he arrived in Singapore, cleared by local authorities and handed to adoptive parents who'd been waiting for a child. He is one of at least 20 babies allegedly bought from Indonesian parents and trafficked into Singapore for adoption, part of a case now sending nearly two dozen people to trial in West Java. Neither government has said whether the children will stay with the families who raised them or be sent back to their biological parents in Indonesia. Roughly two-thirds of children adopted in Singapore each year are born abroad, usually in neighboring countries. Marcus's parents, who asked to be called David and Ally to protect their case, paid tens of thousands of dollars in fees they were told covered agency work, legal costs, and expenses for the child. His adoption sailed through Singapore's approval process.

Read more: BBC

Tharman Visits KL as Bilateral Trade Up 14.5%

President Tharman Shanmugaratnam will be in Kuala Lumpur today to being a three-day state visit, reciprocating Sultan Ibrahim's May 2024 trip to the Istana, with a full diplomatic agenda including a welcome ceremony, state banquet and courtesy call from Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. A six-member delegation has gone along with the president, and their visit includes a business roundtable in KL. In a Bernama interview, Tharman said the relationship was "unique" and said it "has never been, and must never be, a purely transactional" one. Bilateral trade last year was RM402.35 billion ($93.97 billion), and the first five months of 2026 are on pace for a 14.5 percent year-on-year lift.

Read more: CNA (trade fracture), CNA (Amirudin Shari meeting), The Star (DEFA $2T target), AsiaOne (hearts shake hands), Malay Mail (trade partner ranking)

IRAS Claws Back $49M Doctors' Tax Dodge

IRAS, the tax authority, has identified 279 high earners who were funneling salaries through private companies to dodge a 24 percent personal tax rate on income above $1 million, and is clawing back $49 million in 124 cases. All but one involved disguising income as dividends or interest-free shareholder loans, taxed at 17 percent (or often less, after incentives) at the corporate level. One doctor declared a monthly salary of $5,000 to $6,000 while pulling more than $12 million in dividends and shareholder loans over six years. IRAS can now tax the dividends and loans as the doctors' own income.

Read more: AsiaOne

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Crypto Scam Blitz Saves $7 Million

The Anti-Scam Centre and Cyber Investigation Branch spent six weeks, from April 16 to May 31, mining blockchain data in concert with Chainalysis and TRM Labs to identify and catch transfers headed for government-impersonation, investment, romance and job scams. Seven exchanges, Coinbase, Coinhako, Gemini, Independent Reserve, OKX, StraitsX and Upbit, shared customer details fast enough for police to make more than 145 phone and in-person interventions, heading off $4.2 million in losses. A June follow-up safeguarded another $2.9 million from more than 130 victims, so the running total is more than $7 million and nearly 300 people.

Read more: Cryptonews (public-private partnership), Cryptobriefing (real-time tracing)

PDPC Wants Explicit AI-Training Notices

The PDPC wants firms to stop hiding AI training behind fine print like "new product development" and tell users directly when their data will be feeing a generative model. A bank building a chatbot, an insurer training on claims histories, or a social platform improving image generation would each need a specific pop-up, webpage, or email, explaining exactly what the AI does and how to opt out. A text-to-speech feature, for example, would have to disclose that voice recordings will be used to teach the model to recognize speech patterns, not vaguely "improve services." A one-month consultation on the issue was closed July 1.

Read more: Straits Times

Port Tops Maritime Ranking for 13th Straight Year

Singapore held onto the top spot in the Xinhua-Baltic ISCD Index again, scoring 99.32 out of 100, a title it has kept every year since the ranking was introduced in 2014. Shanghai pulled up second at 84.27, London was third with 81.80. The port handled (a record) 44.66 million TEUs in 2025 and sold 56.77 million tonnes of bunker fuel, and is still the world's busiest refueling stop.

Read more: Yahoo Finance

HDB Invokes 1980 Plan to Clear Most of Maju Forest

HDB will clear 15 of Maju Forest's 23 hectares in Clementi's Sunset Way area for new public housing based on residential zoning that dates to the 1980 Master Plan. Eight hectares will remain untouched, including a freshwater stream and land around the former Jurong railway line, where a four-kilometre nature trail is being considered. Nature Society Singapore's Lester Tan says that the retained third is"the minimum compromise," and claims that pangolins could be pushed into the nearby landed enclave and HDB blocks once construction begins. Unit counts and construction timelines haven't been released yet, but public consultation will run through August 6.

Read more: The Independent Singapore (public backlash), Business Times (Clementi Nature Trail)

Temasek Puts 15% on AI by 2031

Temasek plans to more than double the AI slice of its S$518 billion ($383 billion) portfolio, from 6% (roughly S$31 billion) to 15% (roughly S$78 billion), according to Temasek Global Investments CEO Chia Song Hwee. The state investor has been working toward this since 2016, when it decided that digitisation was a structural trend. The organization formed a dedicated AI group in 2019 and then launched Aicadium, which is now a 60-member team of technologists, engineers and researchers in Singapore and the US who are working to push AI tools into portfolio companies including DBS, Singapore Airlines and ST Engineering.

Read more: Business Times (employee AI training), FX Street (GDP breakdown)

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Police Seize Bungalow Behind the Chip Trail

Singapore police have slapped a prohibition order on a S$55 million ($42.5 million) Good Class Bungalow near the Botanic Gardens and charged four people, including Aperia Group CEO Alan Wei Zhaolun, in connection with a server-smuggling scheme that ran from November 2023 through February 2025. The play was to order servers from Dell, Super Micro Computer, and Asus by falsely claiming that Aperia Group companies would be the end-users, then ship the hardware, possibly loaded with Nvidia chips subject to US export controls, to Malaysia. At least two-thirds of the bungalow's purchase price, roughly S$38 million ($29.4 million), allegedly came from proceeds of this activity. Another S$1 million ($772,000) in the bank has been seized on top of the property.

Read more: Yahoo News SG (mansion seizure), Business Times (four firms charged)

Johor's CM Wants the Blueprint Now

Johor caretaker chief minister Onn Hafiz Ghazi publicly admitted last week that the JS-SEZ master plan missed its end-2025 launch target, slipped past the rescheduled March 30, 2026 date, and is now drifting toward a Leaders' Retreat at year-end that Onn Hafiz says it doesn't need to wait for anyway. The zone is intended to bring RM100 billion ($25 billion) of investment and generate 100,000 jobs in its first decade. Economy Minister Akmal Nasir is trying to suggest that investor numbers are still strong and the delays haven't hurt momentum. PM Anwar Ibrahim told everyone to stop politicising the matter.

Read more: CNA

Wong Lands in Jakarta With Half the Cabinet

Singapore invested $17.4 billion into Indonesia in 2025, almost a third of all foreign direct investment entering the country, and has been the top-investor since 2014. PM Wong flew to Jakarta on July 6 for his second annual leaders' retreat with President Prabowo, along with DPM Gan Kim Yong and the defence, foreign affairs, social and family development, and manpower ministers. The last retreat, (Singapore, June 2025), resulted in 19 deliverables in food safety, green economy, cross-border electricity trade and carbon capture. This round will build on agreements inked in the days before the visit, including an environmental sustainability pact, and a nuclear regulatory cooperation deal covering radiation protection and emergency preparedness. The Middle East crisis is also on the agenda.

Read more: Straits Times (acting PM), CNA (sixth-largest trading partner), Business Times (nuclear pact)

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Lawrence Wong Leaves Dili with a Grand Collar

Xanana Gusmao draped the Order of Timor-Leste (Grand Collar) on Lawrence Wong as he finished up the first-ever visit of a Singaporean prime minister to Timor-Leste on July 3. The two of them also signed an MOU on bilateral consultations including specific deliverables. From the second half of 2027, Singapore employers will be able to hire Timorese Work Permit holders in construction, marine, process, and a few other manufacturing jobs, putting Timor-Leste alongside Bhutan, Cambodia, and Laos as approved non-traditional source countries. Wong also promised to expand capacity-building workshops to prepare Timorese officials for the country's 2029 ASEAN chairmanship. The resident embassy in Dili opened in April 2024, and only 50 to 60 Singaporeans currently live in the country, mostly businesspeople and missionaries.

Read more: Business Times (Singapore business push), Business Times (visit timeline), Business Times ($180M remittances)

Tehran Sends Singapore a Power Bill

Household electricity tariffs found a record 31.91 cents/ kWh from July 1, a 17 percent increase on last quarter. Town gas is following at plus 7.1 percent. The blame can go to the “Iran conflict,” and choke in the Strait. The higher prices are now baked into Q3 bills through an EMA's formula which lags a quarter behind cost reality. Businesses are feeling it. Chow Choon Kit, who owns The Patissier cake shop on Tyrwhitt Road, saw his power bill run from around S$1,900 in March to S$3,200 in May on wholesale rates. Almost two-thirds of households are still on SP Group's regulated tariff, and are waiting to see if they should lock into a fixed-price retail plan before Q4 either brings relief or more pain.

Read more: CNA (fixed-plan decision), Business Times (official EMA tariffs), Business Times (business owner stress)

Cloud Giants Meet Their Regulator

The Ministry of Digital Development and Information opened public consultation on July 1 on a proposed Digital Infrastructure Bill that would license data centre operators running 10MW or more of critical IT load, as well as the big cloud service providers serving Singapore users. Both categories would be forced to have security risk management, business continuity, disaster recovery, and incident reporting plans shared with IMDA. The consultation window closes July 22, though MDDI offered no timeline for getting the Bill passed.

Read more: Business Times

Taipei's Rich Pick Raffles Place Over Central

Taiwanese money is moving into Singapore as anxiety about the future builds. The play seems to be the set-up family offices here instead of Hong Kong, to get employment passes, and moving a chunk of their wealth to a place Beijing can’t easily get to. More than two-thirds of the high-net-worth Taiwanese and advisers surveyed by Bloomberg said cross-strait tensions are getting bad enough to force action. Hong Kong spent decades as the default offshore stop for Taiwanese money.

Read more: Business Times

One in Seven Households Now Clears S$30k a Month

The share of Singapore households pulling in at least S$30,000 a month nearly doubled over the past five years, and was reportedly 13.4 percent as of 2025. Median household market income rose above S$12,000 for the first time, and has seen, a real gain of 3.2 percent yearly after inflation since 2020. Dual-income couples were responsible for much of the shift, their share rose from 52.5 percent to 56.6 percent of married couples, while the slice that had only the husband working dropped to just above 1 in 5 households.

Read more: Business Times

Agents First, Then Buyers

Property agents picked up 635 units by way of priority queues at new condo launches between September 2024 and October 2025 - that was about 4.2 percent of all new private homes launched in that stretch. At some projects, like Emerald of Katong, agents took up to 20 percent of units before public sales started. The Council for Estate Agencies has since engaged OrangeTee and Huttons Asia to advise on disclosure protocols, though the practice is legal and how “priority access” is decided is a developer's decision.

Read more: Business Times

Sentosa Plays the Long Game

The Sentosa Development Corporation introduced a 20-year Greater Sentosa Master Plan last week as it pushes to double the island's 16.9 million yearly visitors. The plan folds in neighbouring Pulau Brani, whose port will get progressively decommissioned by 2027, with a new Brani West site set aside as one of the largest attractions hubs in the pipeline. New landmarks won't start opening until the early 2030s, but one card already on the table is Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios Singapore, which will join existing versions at Universal Studios Japan, Hollywood, and Epic Universe. Talks with potential partners for Brani West are underway; SDC isn't saying who.

Read more: South China Morning Post (SDC CEO quotes), Business Times (visitor mix shift), Wdwnt (Super Nintendo World)

BTS Army Marches on Singapore's Treasury

Four BTS concerts at the National Stadium in December are expected to pull in S$200-300 million ($150-230 million) in tourism receipts, with hotel bookings on Trip.com already up more than 18 times when compared to the same period last year for the concert dates. DBS thinks the figure will come in at the lower end (S$200 million), noting that unlike Taylor Swift's exclusive six-night Singapore run in 2024, BTS also has stops in several other Southeast Asian countries on their Arirang world tour.

Read more: Straits Times

MAS Writes Rules and ISCA Trains Humans

MAS published SAFR, a governance framework for autonomous AI agents in finance, built with banks and fintechs to make sure policy checks and audit trails are baked into transactions before they are executed. ISCA and IMDA also launched something they’re calling “AIxAccountancy,” which is part of an effort to make 100,000 non-tech professionals "AI bilingual." ISCA expects to run 60,000 accountancy and corporate finance professionals (and all 4,000 of the Accountant-General’s Department’s public-sector finance and internal audit officers) through the program over the next 36 months .

Read more: Digital Watch (SAFR framework), Business Times (AIxAccountancy phases)

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Pritam Survives the Cadres

Between 79 and 84 (depending on who you ask) of the 107 cadres who showed up voted to keep Pritam Singh as the Workers' Party secretary-general on Sunday. This is a result that’s now buried, at least internally, a saga stretching back to Raeesah Khan's lies to Parliament in 2021 and Singh's own two convictions for lying to a Committee of Privileges. The special conference had been forced by a letter sent last December that demanded Singh account for himself, step down, or face a vote (the same vote that he just won). In this case, however, no one challenged him for the position.

Read more: CNA (CEC composition), CNA (Low endorsement), CNA (succession planning), South China Morning Post (84 of 107), Bloomberg (Gerald Giam)

Singapore Internet Gets a Hall Monitor

The Online Safety Commission started operations on Monday with teeth and a growl. The 40-person agency has the power to order platforms to remove “harmful” content, block access to users in Singapore, or force app stores to pull apps. Platforms that drag their feet on harassment or stalking complaints will be allowed 24 hours before the OSC steps in; for doxxing, intimate image abuse, and image-based child abuse, victims are now able to file directly. The legal basis, the Online Safety (Relief and Accountability) Act passed in Parliament in November, covers 13 sorts of online harm, though the OSC is beginning with the five it considers most serious.

Read more: CNA (free filing, named platforms), CNA (app store removal), Business Times ($5,000 minimum damages), AsiaOne ($500,000 maximum damages)

Boss Comes Home but Loses Passport

Ramu Palani Velu, the permanent resident who allegedly left 407 workers from India and Bangladesh unpaid for months, flew back to Singapore on Friday and promptly had his passport impounded. Minister of State for Manpower Dinesh Vasu Dash gave the news in person to about 280 of the stranded workers. About 40 construction firms have offered 150-or-so jobs to the workers. Twenty have been placed so far, and the rest are expected to get roles over the next two or three weeks.

Read more: AsiaOne (MWC, NTUC support), Firstpost (SGD 200 assistance), Economic Times (TADM contact)

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Singapore Flag Meets Iranian Projectile

The Ever Lovely was leaving the Strait of Hormuz on the night of June 25 when it got hit. Evergreen Marine says the Taiwan-operated, Singapore-registered container ship was following the UK navy's recommended route off Oman when an "unidentified object" damaged the bridge superstructure, shattering windows. All 21 crew have been accounted for, the engines kept running, and the ship completed its transit. Two US officials told Reuters that Iran fired the projectile. Tehran's Persian Gulf Strait Authority, set up to manage transit requests through the strait, was more circumspect, saying that vessels using unauthorised routes do so at their owners' risk. At least four tankers, including three crude carriers each capable of hauling two million barrels, entered the Gulf on Friday despite the misfortune of the Ever Lovely.

Read more: CNA (MPA condemnation), South China Morning Post (tanker movements)

MAS Cuts Queue for Fund Approvals

DPM Gan Kim Yong used the Association of Banks in Singapore dinner on June 25 to announce that Singapore is getting a new Protected Cell Company framework for insurers, as well as faster approvals for new fund categories. The PCC structure, conceptually similar to the existing Variable Capital Company setup, will allow assets and liabilities to sit in ring-fenced cells under a single core entity, making captive insurance more accessible for corporates and insurance-linked securities faster and cheaper to issue. MAS is expected to publish a consultation on the framework shortly. Gan said that by his reckoning, Asia is still "markedly underinsured.”

Read more: Business Times

Goh's Nine-Point-Seven Million Smiles

Singapore Airlines CEO Goh Choon Phong took home nearly S$9.7 million ($7.3 million) for the year ended March 31, up from about S$7 million ($5.3 million) the year prior, as the carrier reported record revenue of S$20.5 billion ($15.4 billion) and flew 42.2 million passengers, a 7.7 percent increase. Operating profit was up 39 percent, but net profit fell 57.4 percent (the previous year was padded by a S$1.1 billion ($825 million) non-cash gain from the Air India-Vistara merger). The board's compensation committee said the package was both "appropriate and not excessive." About half of Goh's pay was in the form of shares, partly because the sixth and final tranche of a Covid-era retention scheme, disbursed in July 2025, overlapped with grants under SIA's ongoing share plans. Base salary was about S$1.5 million ($1.1 million); bonuses made up another 35 percent.

Read more: Business Times

Telcos Talk MAS Out of Moving

Core inflation was 1.4 percent in May, flat from April and a smidge below the 1.6 percent economists had penciled in, as cheaper telecoms reduced services prices. MAS and MTI have kept their full-year forecast at 1.5 to 2.5 percent and warned that energy costs working their way through global supply chains could still push prices up. Private-sector economists now think MAS will hold policy at its July meeting.

Read more: Business Times (CPI breakdown), Business Times (MAS July hold)

Ghosts in the Strait of Malacca

RSS Invincible and RSS Impeccable are in service, the first two of a fleet of Type 218SG submarines built by Germany's ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems and tuned by Singapore's DSTA for shallow tropical waters. The Invincible-class runs on fuel-cell air-independent propulsion, letting it stay submerged far longer than conventional diesel-electrics. Singapore retired its last Cold War-era Swedish Challenger-class boat in late 2024, and the move from refurbished relics to bespoke German hulls is considerable.

Read more: Defencesecurityasia

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Chips Are Up

Electronics exports nearly doubled year on year in May, pushing NODX growth to 38.4 percent, the fastest clip since December 2003 and well clear of the 30.5 percent economists had figured on. Integrated circuits added S$1.6 billion ($1.2 billion) to the tally, and shipments to Taiwan more than doubled as Singapore becomes more deeply tied into AI supply chains centered on Taipei and Seoul. Maybank has lifted its full-year NODX forecast to 15 percent. The wrinkle is that the MAS quarterly survey that absorbed this data also showed professional forecasters nudging the 2026 growth estimate down to 3.5 percent while pushing median inflation forecasts to 2.3 percent headline and 2.0 percent core, both up from 1.5 percent in March. Headline inflation expectations are now running more than half a point above the March read.

Read more: Business Times (pharma, trade totals), Business Times (economist outlook), Business Times (MAS tightening odds)

Swiss Miss

Singapore is back on top of the 2026 IMD World Competitiveness Ranking, published June 18, displacing Switzerland at the head of a 70-economy table it last led in 2024. The move was driven by a seven-place jump in business efficiency, enough to overtake Switzerland, which slipped two spots to third as US tariffs and a strong franc weighed on investment flows. Hong Kong moved up one place to second, with government efficiency still its calling card.

Read more: Bloomberg (Swiss franc impact), Business Times (Singapore sub-rankings)

Peace Won’t Cut the Power Bill

The Iran ceasefire won’t show up on July power bills, unfortunately. The regulated tariff, currently 29.72 cents per kWh, is set for a 20 to 30 percent increase next quarter because electricity prices are based on fuel costs from April through mid-June, when energy markets were rattled by disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz after February strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure. For a four-room HDB flat, that could mean roughly S$30 (~$22) extra a month on top of an average bill already close to S$88 (~$65). Nearly two-thirds of households pay the regulated rate, and they have no long-term contract to soften the blow. Natural gas is used for 95 percent of Singapore’s electricity generation, and more than half of it comes as LNG from suppliers including the Middle East.

Read more: Business Times

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The Circle Finally Closes

Three new MRT stations, Keppel, Cantonment and Prince Edward Road, open July 12 to complete the Circle Line loop that's been incomplete since the line first opened in 2009. The Land Transport Authority estimates station-to-station travel time along the new stretch at roughly two minutes, but the real benefit is found in what can now disappear. A 19-year-old national serviceman's Pasir Panjang to City Hall run drops from 45 minutes to 18; a Clementi student's weekly trip to Bras Basah Complex gets cut from more than an hour to 38 minutes. Fares on affected routes will also fall, because the Public Transport Council calculates costs on the shortest available path, and the shortest path is now a lot shorter.

Read more: Straits Times

Chips Are Thirsty

PUB is getting S$12 million ($9 million) to tackle a problem chip fabs and data centres have been sweating over. They are among the most water-intensive sectors in the economy, and both are growing fast. At UMC’s Pasir Ris wafer fab, about 10,000 cubic metres of NEWater move through daily, passing through about 1,000 manufacturing steps before much of it is collected, re-treated, and sent back into the system. The plant recovers nearly 70 percent of the water, about 3.9 million cubic metres a year, or 1,560 Olympic pools. OVHcloud, which pipes chilled water directly to its processors instead of cooling entire server rooms, says the approach can reduce water use by up to 30 percent. The S$85 million ($63 million) R&D envelope, announced June 16 at Singapore International Water Week, is going to come in under the RIE2030 plan.

Read more: CNA (PUB funding), CNA (UMC and OVHcloud water use)

MAS Flags the Exchange Next Door

MAS added Bybit to its investor alert list on June 17, without explanation. The crypto exchange handles more than $20 billion in daily trading and was co-founded by Singapore-based CEO Ben Zhou, who holds passports from Singapore, Vanuatu, and China. Bybit says it has been blocking local IP addresses and does not serve users in Singapore.

Read more: Business Times

Why the Dub?

Filmmakers Eric Khoo and Jack Neo went public on June 19 with a blunt question. If dialect films play freely on streaming, home video, and in-flight entertainment, why do cinemas alone have to enforce a language policy from another era? Their target is the handling of Dear You, a Teochew-language film that received a one-night premiere at Sands Theatre on June 17. The original version will also be shown at festivals and select screenings, and the Mandarin-dubbed cut is getting a general theatrical release. Director Boo Junfeng, who has seen the Teochew version, says the dub reduces the film's authenticity and he won't watch it. Royston Tan plans to drive to Malaysia to watch it as intended. The Infocomm Media Development Authority says the arrangement aligns with the bilingual policy promoting Mandarin as the main language for Chinese Singaporeans.

Read more: Straits Times

A Familiar Russian Argument

Vladimir Putin met PM Lawrence Wong in Kazan on the sidelines of a Russia-ASEAN summit to celebrate 35 years of ties. Putin used the meeting to revive an old claim, saying Western sanctions had kept the economic relationship between the two countries from reaching its full potential. The remarks were directed at a government that continues to maintain its own sanctions on Russia over Ukraine. Putin showed up with a delegation of more than a dozen officials, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Bakanov, and Kirill Dmitriev of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. The most recent Russia-Singapore Business Dialogue was held in Singapore in April.

Read more: Kremlin RU (Russian delegation roster), Malay Mail (Singapore sanctions stance)

AI Money Keeps Coming

OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and Tencent have all opened up or expanded shop here in the past year, and Plaud, a San Francisco AI notetaker, has committed S$10 million ($7.8 million) to expand local operations. Companies are attracted by Singapore’s political neutrality, world-class universities, and predictable regulatory environment. Less encouraging is a 2026 Gallup finding that only 14 percent of Singapore’s workforce is engaged at work, well below the Southeast Asian average of 25 percent and the global average of 20 percent. The figure has barely moved in three years.

Read more: Straits Times (manager engagement drop), Fortune (OpenAI investment)

Brothers Bet on Unbreakable Math

Lim Meng Liang, 38, spent years solving equations that have no solutions. Now he's turned that uselessness into a feature. Aires Applied Quantum Technology, the startup he founded in 2023 with older brother Ken Lin, a 15-year finance veteran, has raised more than US$2 million (S$2.6 million) from private investors and Enterprise Singapore for LionGuard, a quantum-resistant encryption app built on Diophantine equations. The beta app has more than 100 subscribers at US$388 per user per month including oil and gas, commodities, banking and other sectors, and the brothers are hunting an eight-figure IPO in the US, Singapore or Japan to take it global.

Read more: Straits Times

That's all for this week, thanks for reading. Your voice matters to us. Feel we're missing something? Have additional sources to suggest? Don't hold back - hit reply and tell us what you think.

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All the Eggs in a Single Silicon Basket

Electronics exports from Singapore grew 57.8 percent year-on-year in Q1, which is more than double the 23.4 percent result seen in the last quarter of 2025. Chips, by themselves, made up S$1.7 billion ($1.3 billion) of March's S$3.1 billion ($2.3 billion) of electronics shipments. The rest of the export economy didn't keep pace, though. Non-electronics exports were down 3.5 percent over the same period, as US tariff pressure took a bite. Throughout the region the story is broadening, with non-tech exports from China, India, South Korea and Taiwan rising at an annualized 27 percent pace so far in the six months to April. Singapore produces one in 10 chips made globally and one in five pieces of semiconductor equipment. The sector makes up close to 6 percent of Singapore GDP.

Read more: Business Times

The AI Talent Race

AI salaries in Singapore are going up 15 to 25 percent yearly, which is a pace five times that of overall wages. New graduates are walking out of university into starting packages of S$70,000 to S$90,000 ($53,000 to $68,000). The hottest role nobody knew of three years ago, the forward deployed engineer (a hybrid of coder, consultant, and client whisperer), now makes at least S$120,000 ($91,000) at mid-career. US based semiconductor equipment supplier Applied Materials has opened a US$500 million campus in Tampines that more than doubles its advanced cleanroom capacity and is expected to add 1,000 jobs over the next twelve months. The company has been in Singapore since 1991; Asia already makes up more than 80 percent of its revenue, and it is betting the next AI chip wave is going to run, at least partly, through the Lion City.

Read more: Straits Times (forward deployed engineers), Business Times (talent shortage), Business Times (Applied Materials campus)

Changi's Hormuz Dividend Comes With an Expiry

More than 400 additional flights connecting Singapore to cities including Frankfurt, London, Munich, Paris, Perth, and Sydney ran out of Changi between March and May, making up for reduced Gulf carrier services that were hammered by the crisis in the Gulf. Singapore Airlines moved fast, adding capacity and increasing the pace of flights on its European routes for the rest of 2026. The success came with a warning from IATA director-general Willie Walsh who, while being complimentary about SIA's speed, also kept his praise capped. He said that once stability returns, the Gulf hubs will be quick to rebound. He said that Etihad CEO Antonoaldo Neves has already told him the airline expects July capacity to run higher than a year ago.

Read more: Business Times

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S$500 Vouchers Come Early on Inflation Risks

The government pushed S$500 ($390) of CDC vouchers to 1.38 million households on June 11, bringing the payout forward six months from January 2027. DPM Gan Kim Yong was candid about the reasons when he said that cost pressures from outside of Singapore haven't fully been felt, and inflation is likely to climb in coming months as higher energy and input costs work through supply chains. Core inflation did ease to 1.4 percent in April from 1.7 percent in March, but Gan reminded us that the Middle East situation is "fluid."

Read more: Business Times

Allianz Leads Race for HSBC Singapore

Allianz is now considered to be the front runner to take over HSBC Life Singapore, outbidding Sumitomo Life and Daiichi Life in a deal HSBC has valued at $2 billion. HSBC kicked off the review in January under CEO Georges Elhedery, who has been working to streamline the bank’s portfolio of businesses picked up by his predecessor Noel Quinn, including the $529 million AXA Singapore buy (in 2022). Allianz's last attempt at growing its presence in Singapore, a roughly S$2.2 billion ($1.7 billion) bid for a majority stake in Income Insurance, was withdrawn in 2024 after Singapore regulators squawked. Nothing is final, as of yet, and other bidders remain in contention.

Read more: Business Times (UOB asset management), Seekingalpha (tickers)

Resale Condo Market Slows

Resale condo listings are currently sitting on the market for an average of 81 days, which is almost double the 45-day median during the 2022 post-Covid peak. The stalemate appears fairly uniformly across both central and outside central regions. Sellers are holding firm partly because rising land costs mean replacing what they sell will cost more over the next 12 to 18 months, making price reductions less attractive. Buyers also seem to be in no hurry, however. Four in ten PropertyGuru listings have been up for more than 90 days.

Read more: Straits Times

The Birth Rate Challenge

Singapore's total fertility rate fell to 0.87 in 2025, the lowest on record, and the government has formed a Marriage & Parenthood Reset workgroup to figure out why. Any reader of Reddit probably already has a pretty good sense to the real reasons. A parent logging 45 to 48 hours a week isn't coming home with much gas left in the tank for family life. One post referenced Mexico's new 40-hour work cap, (no salary cuts attached) and got broad endorsement. Plenty of workers in Singapore are still on 6-day weeks.

Read more: The Independent Singapore

Seletar's Hangar Rush

Gulfstream has opened its first dedicated Asia-Pacific customer support facility at Seletar, staffed by eight. The office runs in partnership with Jet Aviation, one of six authorized Gulfstream service centers. It follows Bombardier's June 9 announcement of a $100 million, 250,000 sq ft build-out at Seletar Aerospace Park. WingsOverAsia broke ground on its own MRO and innovation facility there earlier this year, hoping to handle larger jets like the G700 by 2027.

Read more: Aerospace Global News

SIA Hitches a Ride on Southwest

Singapore Airlines and Southwest launched an interline partnership on June 8, giving SIA passengers single-ticket access to nearly 120 US domestic destinations via Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. KrisFlyer miles will neither accrue no be able to be redeemed however. Southwest has, until now, remained out of the major global alliances, so this is a way for SIA to extend its US reach without the usual entanglements. SIA is now the eighth interline partner for Southwest, joining the likes of ANA, EVA Air, and Turkish Airlines.

Read more: CNA

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Washington Calls Its Best Customer a Cheat

The US Trade Representative published a 98-page report this week proposing a 12.5% tariff on roughly a third of Singapore's exports to the United States, the final chapter of a Section 301 forced labor investigation that MTI rejected, saying there is "no evidence" of Singapore's role in supply chains tied to forced labor. The US runs a goods trade surplus with Singapore, and Changi Naval Base hosts the US warships Washington would need if things go sideways in the Taiwan Strait. Carve-outs for semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, certain electronics, energy and aerospace products will soften the blow, but the label is still going to sting (probably more than the levy, truth be told). Bilateral trade was S$139.2 billion ($106 billion) in 2025, with S$27 billion ($20.6 billion) of that Singapore's non-oil domestic exports to the US, its largest NODX market. The proposed rates would replace the baseline 10% reciprocal tariff that will expire July 24; USTR panel hearings are scheduled to begin in July.

Read more: Foreign Policy (PM Wong), Business Times (exemption list)

Chinese Curry Concentrate Gets Cut Off

Singapore used the Online Criminal Harms Act on June 6 to order YouTube, Facebook, and X to block 14 posts traced to a China-based platform, accusing them of trying to fracture the city-state's multiracial society with claims it was being "overrun" by Indians. The content, which started circulating in Chinese-language online spaces in May, used footage of busy Little India streets and a religious procession on Pagoda Street to dress up claims that the Indian presence had reached a "concentration of curry." Law Minister Edwin Tong, Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam, and Digital Development Minister Josephine Teo all went on record Saturday, an unusually thick ministerial response for 14 posts that in some cases had only a few thousand views. Tong was careful to say there is no evidence of a coordinated state campaign, saying it was likely the work of foreign netizens acting organically.

Read more: CNA (Josephine Teo), CNA (May timeline), Business Times (Edwin Tong), NDTV (OCHA legal basis), Times of India (racial demographics)

Factories Keep Growing as Finished Goods Slip

Factory activity was 51.0 in May, the highest reading since December 2024 and the tenth straight month of expansion. The electronics PMI ticking up to 51.9 for its twelfth month of growth in a row. AI demand is still doing the heavy lifting, but finished goods are sliding into contraction as inventory drawdowns outpace restocking activity. With the Iran war grinding into its fourth month, Strait of Hormuz issues continue to push input prices up and slow down supplier deliveries.

Read more: Business Times

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Temasek Chair Wants Risk on the Spreadsheet

Temasek chairman Teo Chee Hean used his first full press interview since taking the top job in October 2025 to say that the numbers on a spreadsheet aren’t enough anymore. The 71-year-old former coordinating minister for national security said geopolitical risk now needs to be measured alongside financial analysis before any major bet, because circumstances can "change fundamentally" even after a deal closes. He also addressed a question about value creation by making it clear that pumping money into the system can’t manufacture value that isn't inherently there. Temasek's net portfolio value was a record S$434 billion ($339 billion) as at Mar 31, 2025.

Read more: Business Times (portfolio restructuring), Business Times (geopolitical risk)

Singaporeans Are Richer, but Deeper in Hock

Household net wealth was S$3.3 trillion ($2.5 trillion) in Q1 2026, up 6.7% from a year earlier, but liabilities grew faster at 8.2%. That’s 10 consecutive quarters of accelerating borrowing. It's the second quarter in a row in which debt’s outpaced wealth-building. Mortgages, which are at least 70% of total household liabilities, grew 5.8% year on year, up from 5.4% the quarter prior. Personal loans, including those for autos, credit cards, education, and renovations, were increased for the ninth quarter running and now stand at S$118.6 billion ($88 billion). Total liabilities are S$415 billion ($309 billion). Net worth still works out to roughly 8.7 times annual take-home pay, which a Fitch Solutions unit reckons keeps widespread risk "very low."

Read more: Straits Times

Beijing Fines Brokers, Singapore Users Shrug

Chinese regulators fined Futu (which owns Moomoo), Tiger Brokers and Longbridge a combined US$330 million (S$425 million) in late May for serving mainland clients without required licenses. Singapore users don’t appear to care. MAS said the local entities are "financially independent" of the penalized group companies, and client money is in segregated trust or custody accounts that can't be touched to cover the brokers' liabilities. Longbridge's custodian is DBS. Singapore made up 41 percent of paying clients at Tiger's US-listed parent UP Fintech in 2025, according to Bloomberg Intelligence estimates, and Moomoo claimed more than 1.5 million local users as of July last year.

Read more: Straits Times

New Hands on the Reserves

Tan Chong Meng, Temasek's deputy chairman, took over as chair of the Council of Presidential Advisers on June 2, succeeding Eddie Teo, who spent more than seven years steering the body that advises the President. Piyush Gupta, who ran DBS before moving to become chair at Keppel, will step up from alternate to full member, alongside the re-appointment of former Singtel group CEO Chua Sock Koong and the elevation of Singapore LNG chairman Gan Seow Kee from alternate to member. Teo, 79, joined the council in 2018 and chaired it from January 2019, a stretch President Tharman Shanmugaratnam said had been "exceptionally demanding."

Read more: Business Times

Safran and SIAEC Take a Leap of Faith at Changi

SIA Engineering and France's Safran Aircraft Engines are putting US$118 million into a joint venture to build a full-service shop for CFM Leap engines in Changi North. Safran holds 51% and SIAEC the remaining 49%. The JV subsumes SIAEC's existing quick-turn Leap work and will expand to cover both the Leap-1A and Leap-1B, the engines powering the A320neo family and 737 Max fleets that are doing especially well these days throughout Asia-Pacific. SIAEC is chipping in up to US$57.8 million (including US$13.7 million in-kind), Safran up to US$60.2 million, with room for more if needed. The tie-up extends a 10-year Leap maintenance agreement the two signed in 2019.

Read more: Business Times

Fraud Charges Can't Dislodge the Kitchen CEO

Sally Chua Chwee Choo, CEO and executive director of SGX-listed Singapore Kitchen Equipment, was (along with senior manager Charlene Koh Sai Eng and former CFO Chow Mei Ling) charged this week with fraud by false representation and falsification of accounts. The charges are concerning eight payments totalling S$1.4 million ($1.1 million) made by majority shareholder QKE Holdings on behalf of main operating subsidiary Q'son Kitchen Equipment. QKE employees are said to have altered documents without the executive directors' knowledge. All three remain free on bail. The board, excluding Chua and her co-founder husband Alan Lee, has decided it is in the "best interest of the company" for Chua and Koh to stay in their jobs pending the results of the next court hearing on July 1.

Read more: Business Times

Commercial COE Closes in on Six Figures

The Category C COE was S$94,000 ($70,500) at the June 4 tender, another new record over the previous high-water mark that had been found two weeks before. EcoSwift CEO Ryan Woon thinks that S$100,000 is a lock before year's end, with EV demand, high diesel prices, and tight supply all pushing the same way.

Read more: Business Times (all COE premiums), Business Times (S$100K forecast)

Lion City Joins the Startup Big Leagues

StartupBlink's 2026 index put Singapore at #10 globally, the first time the city has cracked that tier in the 1,500 ranked. The fintech ranking is coming in ever better still. Singapore was listed as #2 in the world, with only the San Francisco Bay Area coming in ahead. At the country level Singapore sits in fourth place, on the back of a startup sector that’s valued at $292.1 billion (S$375.4 billion) and growing at a 24.4 percent clip (yoy).

Read more: The Independent Singapore

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Hegseth's Roll Call Skips Taipei, Singapore Builds Plan B

Pete Hegseth read out the names of the Indo-Pacific partners stepping up to Washington’s 3.5 percent of GDP defence spending benchmark at the Shangri-La Dialogue on May 30. The list included Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Defence Minister Chan Chun Sing used the same conference to launch GUIDE, a 17-country plan to protect undersea cables and pipelines. Signatories include the like of Estonia and Latvia to the Philippines and Qatar. Over breakfast on May 31, the five FPDA members re-committed to the 55-year-old pact. Chan said the agreement were "coalitions of the able and willing."

Read more: CNA (GUIDE signatories), CNA (FPDA reaffirmation), Business Times (FPDA attendees), Business Times (Hegseth omission), AsiaOne (Chan AI governance)

AI Money Floods In and Electronics Roar To Life

Singapore's AI bet is starting to pay off on (at least) a couple of fronts. Venture funding got to nearly S$6 billion ($4.5 billion) in 472 deals throughout last year and AI made up nearly a third of the total deal value, which is nearly double its share the year before. AI funding rose 28 percent to $1.4 billion even though the number of transactions fell marginally from 224 to 202, which is probably more selectivity than retreat. April factory output then climbed 17.6 percent year on year, blowing past the 12 percent average forecast from a Bloomberg poll, with the surprise number being electronics up 44 percent on AI-related demand. That’s the quickest pace since mid-2024. Singapore also continued to dominate SEA, taking up almost 75 cents of every dollar of ASEAN-6 deal value. Indonesia was a distant second at ~15%.

Read more: Business Times (fintech breakdown), Business Times (chemicals disruption)

The Bot Broke Is But Who Pays?

IMDA's May 2026 discussion paper, drafted by a working group of more than 20 lawyers in government, academia, and private firms, is one of the first systematic efforts by any government body to try and figure out civil liability over the agentic AI value chain. Model developers, tooling providers, and platform operators are all getting scrutiy. The 36-page paper doesn't hand down any verdicts yet, but it’s interesting to see that moves are being made at the regulatory level about apportioning blame for when things (inevitably) go wrong.

Read more: PPC Land

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One VSIP Per Province

Vietnam’s To Lam spent Saturday in Singapore meeting bigwigs from CapitaLand, Sembcorp, SATS, SEA Limited, Keppel and UOB, collecting expressions of interest for industrial parks, data centres, logistics and finance. The Communist Party General Secretary made it clear that future parks in Vietnam will be expected to be green, smart, and wired into innovation centres and low-emission manufacturing. CapitaLand, with three decades of VN experience, is looking at green housing, smart urban projects, industrial real estate, logistics and green data centres.

Read more: The Investor

Chaos Pays, If You're Big Enough to Survive It

Vitol told banks it pulled in about $2 billion in Q1 profits, after the world's largest independent energy trader entered Q2 nursing losses from the February 28 US-Israel strike on Iran. The strike upended Middle Eastern supply and wrong-footed traders who had bet on falling energy prices. Because traders were able to begin trading into the volatility, Singapore-based Trafigura said it one of its best-ever quarters. Gunvor made more in the quarter than it did in all of 2025. The catch, which can uncomfortably found in Agrocorp's numbers, is that smaller traders that were locked into fixed-price contracts before the conflict simply had to eat the cost increases with few places to hide.

Read more: Business Times

Workers Win the Math and Lose the Raise

Real wages were up 4 percent through 2025, the fastest pace in at least two years, but the heavy lifting was done by a fall in inflation of 0.9 percent, not by employers getting generous. Nominal wage growth slowed to 4.9 percent from 2024’s 5.6 percent, and the share of firms that gave raises dropped to 72.4 percent from 78.3 percent. The Ministry of Manpower is taking it as a win. Administrative and support services led all sectors at 7.5 percent, propped up by Progressive Wage Model floors and Local Qualifying Salary rules. Accommodation cost increase moderated to 3.9 percent from 5.5 percent as the post-pandemic hiring rush is moving into the past.

Read more: Business Times

Ron Sim's Supplements Saga Sours

Singapore's Court of Appeal gave GNC Holdings a clean win on May 25, upholding rights to LAC Global's retail leases and confirming more than $18.9 million in damages against V3 Group (the holding company of Osim founder Ron Sim). The dispute goes back to 2022, when LAC rebranded its 54 GNC franchise stores and tore up the agreements, betting that GNC's own prior contract breaches in Malaysia and Taiwan would release it from the obligation to return the stores. A Pittsburgh tribunal disagreed in 2024, and the Court of Appeal has backed the tribunal. LAC's 64 current outlets are going to have an unclear future now because lease handovers require landlord consent, and the company isn’t yet wiling to say whether stores will be rebranded or even who will run them.

Read more: Business Times

Ascott Cashes Out, Shanghai Cashes In

CapitaLand Ascott Trust is selling the 336-key Robertson House to a mainland Chinese shipping investor for S$360 million ($282 million), close to S$1.1 million per key, at an exit EBITDA yield of 2.3 percent. The Temasek-linked REIT will pocket a handsome S$38.1 million gain and a 4 percent premium to book value. They plan to take net proceeds of S$341.7 million toward higher-yielding plays. The buyer, reportedly a mainland individual with shipping industry ties, is apparently making his or her first bet on Singapore commercial property with the play. After the deal closes in the Q3, CLAS will be down to four lodging assets in the city, including the Somerset Clarke Quay redevelopment inside Canninghill Piers, which is expected to start contributing income in early 2027.

Read more: Mingtiandi

Singtel Lines Up S$1.5 Billion for the AI Bill

Singtel's treasury unit has signed a three-year revolving credit facility of S$1.5 billion ($1.1 billion) with 11 banks, including ANZ, Bank of America, ICBC, Standard Chartered, Westpac, HSBC, OCBC and UOB, to help fund a S$3 billion capex plan thorough 2027. Of the total, S$1.2 billion is planned for data centres and “AI.” The group is also shopping a minority stake in its Australian unit Optus.

Read more: Business Times

Bread and Blazers Head North

Gardenia is the latest company to move its production from Singapore to Johor Bahru, laying off 141 workers at its bakery. As previously reported in the Singapore Weekly, H&M is also moving its Southeast Asian headquarters north - in that case to Kuala Lumpur, in a move that will result in the loss of about 80 positions. Gardenia announced the move on May 20, calling it part of an ongoing push for "operational efficiency" in a tougher global environment. H&M's relocation surfaced in Malaysian media earlier in the month. That company didn’t bother to give much in the way of explanation.

Read more: South China Morning Post

The Storm Was Right There on the Radar

Singapore's Transport Safety Investigation Bureau published its final report on flight SQ321 last week, two years after the May 2024 disaster left one passenger dead and dozens seriously injured in the skies of Myanmar. The report concludes that the Boeing 777 flew into a developing thunderstorm, not the clear air turbulence initially claimed. The fasten seatbelt sign came on after 11 seconds of light turbulence; pandemonium ensued a further eight seconds later. Richard Woodward, a former Air Force test pilot who flew Qantas jets for more than three decades, reviewed the report and said he thought it pulled punches. "If it'd been another carrier," he said, "I suspect the report might have been a bit more damning of the pilots."

Read more: Nine

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"Keep Low Key," Said the Container Cartel

Teo Siong Seng, 71, chairman of the Singapore Business Federation and a board member of Enterprise Singapore, was indicted by the US Department of Justice in January after getting fingered as part of a global conspiracy that allegedly doubled the price of dry shipping containers between 2019 and 2021, pushing four manufacturers' profits up almost a hundredfold. Court documents, unsealed May 19, show that Teo was briefed on plans to artificially restrict container production before an agreement was signed by six companies in March 2020. The deal included output quotas, video surveillance of factory floors, and penalties for overproduction. After the November 2019 meeting in Shenzhen, Teo allegedly told co-conspirators "we also need to keep low key." He has taken leave from SBF, the Singapore Economic Resilience Taskforce, and Enterprise Singapore. Teo's parent company, Pacific International Lines, got a $600 million rescue from Temasek unit Heliconia Capital in 2021, during the same period that the cartel's profits were spinning up.

Read more: Business Times (container price rise), Business Times (Teo background), Gcaptain (Vick Ma arrest), Business Times (Mark Lee succession)

OpenAI Plants Its Flag as Beijing Sends Recruiters

OpenAI opened its first Applied AI Lab outside the United States in Singapore this week, backed by a S$300 million ($227 million) commitment and plans to hire more than 200 forward-deployed engineers over the next few years. The lab will work with government agencies on public services, finance, healthcare and digital infrastructure. The government also renewed its National AI Strategy and launched a finance talent pipeline in collaboration with DBS, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and 17 others to offer more than 1,000 internships and traineeships over the next year. While this is happening, Huawei has been busy bussing NTU PhD students to its Buona Vista research centre for "informal networking," and Chinese tech firms are dangling up to five million yuan a year for top AI candidates.

Read more: Straits Times (Chinese salary), Business Times (OpenAI MOU signatories), Business Times (NAIS 10 priorities), Business Times (SME program rollout), Deepmind Google (DeepMind health R&D)

Jakarta Stumbles, Singapore Inherits the Crown

The Singapore bourse (SGX) has overtaken Jakarta as Southeast Asia's biggest stock market, with ~$644 billion of market cap vs IDX's $618 billion (as of May 19). The Jakarta Composite has dropped more than a quarter year to date, the rupiah found a record low of 17,668 to the dollar on May 18, and MSCI has temporarily put a pause on index treatment for Indonesian stocks because of concerns about free-float levels, opaque ownership, and market accessibility. An $80 billion rout in January got the slide underway, and the index provider is also saying a possible downgrade from growing to frontier status might be in the cards. Thailand is siting in third spot with a $576 billion market cap.

Read more: Business Times

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Simba's Spectrum Slip-Up Kills M1 Deal

Tuas Ltd's $1.1 billion bid for M1 collapsed on Friday after several deal conditions were missed, days after IMDA suspended its regulatory review over findings that Simba, Tuas's Singapore unit, may have used radio frequency bands that it was never assigned in order to provide mobile services. Keppel (which still owns83.9% of M1), is putting a 90-day "Plan B" into play in order to try and rightsize the telco through network cost cuts, AI automation, and product rationalization. StarHub is now the likeliest next suitor.

Read more: Yahoo Finance (Singtel clarity bid), Yahoo Finance (ASX:TUA identity)

Beijing Edges Washington on Singapore Investment Ledger

China became the largest source of fixed-asset investment commitments in 2025, beating out the US for the first time. Speaking in Shanghai, Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong said Chinese companies are using the city-state as a manufacturing site, regional hub, or international entity separate from their domestic business. He also toured a humanoid robot incubator in Shanghai and pushed on AI adoption, saying that avoiding a "jobs apocalypse" will require companies big and small to use the technology at scale. The New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor, connecting western China to Singapore and Southeast Asia since 2017, and the incoming Pinglu Canal, which will route cargo ships from south-western China to the sea on a path near Vietnam, got warm words from reps of both countries.

Read more: Business Times (AI, US-China), Business Times (Pinglu Canal, trade)

Bill Winters Discovers What "Lower-Value" Humans Think of Him

Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters told an investor briefing in Hong Kong on May 18 that the bank's plan to cut nearly 8,000 jobs by 2030 was "not cost-cutting" but "replacing in some cases “lower-value human capital” (wow) with the financial capital and the investment capital we are putting in." Asia, where StanChart earns most of its profits, did not take this well. Former Singapore president Halimah Yacob said the language was "disturbing.” One Hong Kong commenter on a Winters LinkedIn post promised to never to bank with Standard Chartered again. By Wednesday, Winters had sent around an internal memo insisting his words had been "reduced to simple headlines or a quote out of context," and tried to reassure staff that "the future of Standard Chartered depends on the talent, judgement, relationships, and commitment of you, our colleagues." , the bank says it will keep hiring relationship managers in Singapore. Temasek Holdings, the bank's largest shareholder, declined to comment.

Read more: The Independent Singapore

The Chairman Never Called

A Singapore CEO forked over US$36.3 million (S$46.5 million) after scammers impersonated his company chairman on a WhatsApp call, telling him to fund a fake acquisition. Between April 13 and 17, the money went into two OCBC accounts, US$27.1 million from a Luxembourg subsidiary and US$9.7 million from the Singapore entity, before the CEO finally thought to make a phone call to the real chairman. The Anti-Scam Centre froze the US$9.7 million that was still parked locally, but US$26.5 million had already made its way to Hong Kong, where police were able to seize more than US$11 million worth of cash and cryptocurrency.

Read more: Cryptoadventure

Truck License More Than a Condo Deposit

Category C COE premiums hit a record S$92,223 ($68,000) last week, the seventh straight increase since February's first round of bidding at S$74,801. The new number eclipses the S$91,101 mark set in March 2023. Two forces are coming into play together. Diesel has had a run from S$2 to as nearly S$4.50 a litre at the same time that new incentives under the Heavy Vehicle Zero Tailpipe Emissions Scheme are up to S$40,000 per electric heavy vehicle and up to S$30,000 per charger. Registrations of electric heavy vehicles were up tenfold y-o-y in Jan/ Feb, and the LTA says e-bus and electric heavy goods vehicle registrations have been climbing since January.

Read more: Business Times (Roland Berger), Business Times (Category A contrast)

Bloomberg Bill Comes Due

Senior counsel Davinder Singh told the High Court on Friday that Bloomberg's malice was "blatantly obvious," pointing to the outlet's decision to drop the paywall on its Singapore mansion secrecy story while publicly standing by the reporting, even after complying with a government takedown order under a fake news law. Singh wants damages higher than the S$574,000 ($448,469) already ordered against The Online Citizen editor Terry Xu over a related article about ministers K. Shanmugam and Tan See Leng.

Read more: South China Morning Post

First, Do No Meltdown

PM Lawrence Wong announced Tuesday that Singapore will undertake an IAEA Integrated Nuclear Infrastructure Review next year, joining Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand, all of which have already completed the same Phase 1 assessment. The review covers issues including waste management, emergency planning, and financing. The IAEA normally puts out the findings after a week-long plenary interview with its experts. Wong was careful to say that the review is not a deployment decision. If it ever gets that far, two more review phases will need to happen first, and the full infrastructure build-out would be expected to take as much as a further 15 years.

Read more: Business Times

FM’s Three-Capital Pyongyang Detour

Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan showed up in Pyongyang this week as part of a five-day swing through China, North Korea, and South Korea. It’s the fourth time a Singaporean political office holder has made the trip since diplomatic ties were opened in 1975. His last visit was June 2018, right before the Trump-Kim summit. George Yeo was the first to go in 2008, and then-Senior Parliamentary Secretary Tan Wu Meng rounded out the short list at the North's 70th founding anniversary in 2018.

Read more: AsiaOne

Tanglin Club Pickleball Putsch

Chong Zhi Cheng and his "Team TC2026" slate unseated the incumbent committee at Tanglin Club's AGM on May 21, with Chong delivering a beating to outgoing president Kevin Gin with 341 votes to 310. The revolt turned on S$12 million ($9.3 million) in capital projects that members say went ahead without proper consultation. The bill was broken down into S$7 million ($5.4 million) for Green Mark certification and S$5 million ($3.9 million) for new pickleball courts. The legendary club, founded in 1865 and home to more than 4,000 members from 70 countries, doesn't often air its laundry publicly, and true to form its spokesperson declined to comment on "individual nominations, election matters or internal deliberations."

Read more: Business Times

Ammonia Will Eventually Get a Berth

Singapore's MPA has given ITOCHU subsidiary ZETA Bunkering the port's first authorization for ship-to-ship ammonia bunkering trials for up to two years. The fueling won't start until late next year, when ITOCHU's newbuild 5,000 cbm ammonia bunker vessel, (currently getting built at Japan's Sasaki works) begins supplying dual-fuel Capesize bulkers owned by Mitsui O.S.K. Lines and Belgium's CMB.TECH. The last ammonia test in Singapore used a single converted offshore support vessel, the Fortescue, in early 2024.

Read more: Marineinsight (authorization date), Maritime Executive (CMB.TECH joint venture)

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Strategy Review Adds an Eighth Pillar for a Cracked World

The Economic Strategy Review's final recommendations (32 of ‘em) were delivered on May 13 with a section that didn't exist in the January midterm. The new eighth focus area, “building economic resilience,” refers to energy supply and supply chain risks. When the midterm was presented, MTI had recently upgraded its 2026 growth forecast to 2-4 percent and the Strait of Hormuz was open. Now the Homefront Crisis Ministerial Committee is coordinating the government's response, and Singapore's Q1 economy has become smaller by a third of a percent quarter-on-quarter. The rest of the report mostly elaborates on January's ideas. It returns to the AI solutions hub, workforce agility, how to get more cutting-edge investment, and taking "bold bets" (many of which will never be expected to pay off).

Read more: Business Times (Hormuz vulnerability), Business Times (stakeholder engagement), Business Times (physical AI)

SIA's India Bet Keeps Getting More Expensive

Singapore Airlines saw record revenue of S$20.5 billion ($16.1 billion) for the year ended March 31, then watched net profit fall 57.4% to S$1.18 billion ($927 million) as Air India reported a S$3.56 billion ($2.8 billion) loss, of which SIA absorbed S$945 million ($743 million). The cascade at the Indian carrier is a stress test nobody wanted. Pakistan shut its airspace to Indian airlines in April 2025, the AI171 crash in Gujarat killed 260 people, and the Iran war has since forced Air India to cancel nearly a third of its peak-summer international flights. Campbell Wilson, the longtime SIA executive installed as Air India's CEO, resigned in April, though he will stay on until the board finds a successor. KPMG wrote (politely) of "indicators of impairment" on the investment but stopped short of a write-down. CEO Goh Choon Phong said its a "long game" with "no shortcut," and then declined to say whether SIA will inject more cash beyond the S$880 million already committed, leaving that conversation for "fellow shareholders." Air India is reportedly looking for at least 100 billion rupees (S$1.47 billion) in renewed support from SIA and Tata.

Read more: CNBC (SIA stake breakdown), Ts2 Tech (jet fuel), Fortune (passenger volume), Travel and Tour World (rupee loss figure)

SGX Lands a Whale With Beijing's Fingerprints

DayOne, the data center business spun out of Shanghai's GDS Holdings, is planning a dual listing on both the SGX and Nasdaq that would raise $5 billion and value the company at around $20 billion. That would make it one of the biggest SGX listings in a decade. Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan are advising. The company had originally lined up a New York-only IPO before SGX officials talked it into a co-listing. The exchange had to go recruiting for its own marquee deal. DayOne rebranded from GDS International in January 2025 and runs hyperscale campuses in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, and Finland. Under the SGX-Nasdaq framework announced last year, companies valued at more than S$2 billion ($1.5 billion) can file a single set of paperwork to list on both bourses, with at least 15 percent of the IPO value on SGX.

Read more: Financial Times (SGX dual-listing rules), Ilsole24ore (Malaysia expansion), Manila Times (Series C backers), Cryptobriefing (GDS retained stake)

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1MDB's Ghost Comes for the Banks

The High Court approved winding-up orders for four BVI-registered entities tied to the 1MDB scandal on May 15, clearing Kroll liquidators Angela Barkhouse and Toni Shukla to file claims against Standard Chartered and BSI Bank's Singapore operations. The entities, Alsen Chance Holdings, Brightstone Jewellery, Brazen Sky and Blackstone Asia Real Estate Partners, were placed into liquidation in the BVI between December 2021 and March 2024. The liquidation move is a workaround. An earlier ruling found that Singapore's Model Law on cross-border insolvency blocked foreign representatives from bringing avoidance claims on transactions that happened before its 2020 introduction, so the liquidators got local winding-up orders to pursue the pre-2020 deals instead. In March, Justice Aidan Xu rejected both banks' efforts to intervene, deciding they had no standing as contingent creditors based on the possibility of future costs orders.

Read more: Business Times

Lee Returns to Guangxi After a Decade

Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong heads to Guangxi and Shanghai on Monday for a five-day trip, his first time back in Guangxi since 2014. The delegation includes officials from the digital development and manpower ministries. Shanghai stops are planned at companies working on AI and other tech. Bilateral trade was S$162.9 billion ($124 billion) in 2025, 11.7 percent of Singapore's global merchandise trade, and the city-state has been China's largest foreign investor by inflows since 2013. Lee's visit comes in the wake of PM Lawrence Wong's March trip to Hainan for the Bo'ao Forum.

Read more: AsiaOne (Zhangjiang AI island), Business Times (JPMorgan summit)

Fake PM, Real Money

A deepfake Zoom call impersonating PM Lawrence Wong, President Tharman, Canada's foreign minister, and the senior diplomatic adviser to the UAE president cost a victim S$4.9 million ($3.8 million). The con opened with a WhatsApp from someone posing as the secretary to the cabinet, inviting the target to an urgent meeting with Wong. The Zoom room was populated with AI-generated stand-ins for BlackRock and Dubai International Financial Centre representatives, and the pitch involved funding tied to the Strait of Hormuz. Police have since been able to get footage of the call, but this is a remarkable tale of how much things have changed lately in the world of fraud.

Read more: South China Morning Post

Loan Sharks Discover the Gig Economy

Johor-based loan shark syndicates found a workaround for Singapore's CCTV problem. They recruit Malaysian delivery riders on Telegram, pay them up to S$100 ($77) a job, and let the gig economy do the harassment. Malaysian and Singapore police arrested 35 people in an operation announced on May 15, including riders and mule account holders, after a New Straits Times report exposed the thing. The method of choice was deliveries of pork products to Muslim borrowers, packaged as "surprise gifts" so riders had plausible deniability about the contents. Several were held after recipients made police reports.

Read more: CNA

MAS Lets Grown-Ups Buy Their Own Derivatives

MAS confirmed rules on May 15 that drop the mandatory financial advice requirement before most retail investors can buy complex products like structured notes, derivatives, and investment-linked policies. The hand-holding will have to remain for any investors that meet two of three criteria: investors aged 62 or older, not proficient in English, or educated below O or N-level. Everyone else can get pre-transaction alerts reminding them to read the documents, AND a nudge toward a learning module if want to better understand the waters they are swimming in.

Read more: Business Times

H&M Packs Up Marina Bay for KL

H&M has moved its Southeast Asian headquarters from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, with about 80 of 256 regional roles cut in the process. The Swedish retailer announced the move to staff on May 11. Six outlets are still open in Singapore, where H&M says it stays "an important market" with a "long-term commitment" to its retail presence.

Read more: Business Times

One-North Buyers Bring Checkbooks

Hudson Place Residences sold 201 of its 327 units on launch weekend at an average S$2,458 ($1,870) per square foot. All 14 three-bedroom deluxe units were snapped up in addition to almost 90% of the four-bedroom premiums. Ninety-nine percent of buyers were Singaporeans or PRs, most of them owner-occupiers, with interest from the western corridor and HDB heartlands like Punggol and Sengkang. The take-up puts neighboring Bloomsbury Residences to shame. That development only managed about 25 percent at its April 2025 launch. PropNex says that comparable launches in the area are going to be priced 20 to 30 percent higher after this result.

Read more: Business Times

Melbourne Gets Superjumbo, Frankfurt Gets a Snub

Singapore Airlines is making the A380 a year-round fixture on the Melbourne run for the first time since 2019, keeping the 471-seat superjumbo on daily SQ237 and SQ228 flights through at least March 2027. Frankfurt’s now bereft of the aircraft entirely over the winter schedule, dropping to Boeing 777-300ER service with frequencies pushed to as many as 20 weekly flights to cover the capacity gap. Frankfurt's First Class cabin will remain, but the Suites product is gone; travelers who specifically booked the A380 may end up in the older 2013 First Class instead (check your booking!). Melbourne passengers that previously booked on the 777 are going to get bumped up into the 2017 Suites cabin. Starlink installation is planned for the A350 and A380 long-haul fleet beginning in Q1 2027 through 2029.

Read more: Aviationa2z (seat capacity gap), Travel and Tour World (Starlink rollout)

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Boards Get a Bill for the Bots

MAS brought bank CEOs together last week because they need to discuss the threat of AI-powered cyberattacks, and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam's message on Saturday was clear that board directors own this risk, and IT can no longer carry it alone. Vulnerabilities that once took expert teams weeks to find can now be found autonomously in hours or minutes, outpacing patching cycles before anyone even knows they're exposed. Fully autonomous end-to-end attack campaigns haven't been seen yet, but Tan said it’s "a matter of time."

Read more: CNA (UNC3886 telco hit), Business Times (CSA's 5 actions), Business Times (CII sectors)

Replace the Humans and Lose the Edge

Minister of State Jasmin Lau used her Parliament time on May 6 to deliver a frank warning to Singapore when she said that if bosses wholesale-replace workers with AI, they will wake up one day with no competitive edge once the same tools are available to everyone, AND have a new dependency on the vendors that sell them. Her view is that “voluntary” cannot mean optional. Where public resources are involved, worker outcomes will be asked for, and consistent shortcomings will get a review of how support will be applied. Manpower Minister Tan See Leng did have an empirical sweetener, however - a Ministry of Manpower study reports that so far only about 6 percent of Singapore companies that adopted AI had also cut headcount as a result.

Read more: Business Times (ESR worker support), Business Times (Tripartite Jobs Council).

Strait Talk on Empty Tanks

Singapore's oil product supply stocks fell to 44.83 million barrels in the week to May 6, the lowest since late July. Middle East crude and fuel imports are still stuck at near zero. Against that backdrop, PM Wong closed the 48th ASEAN Summit in Cebu on Saturday pushing for ratification of the ASEAN Petroleum Security Agreement, a deal that would allow member states help cover each other's oil and gas needs during supply disconnects. Leaders also floated a regional fuel stockpile modelled on the ASEAN Plus Three emergency rice reserve, and Philippine President Marcos said it could act as a shared "reservoir" that countries could lean on. Wong said the talks were "very early stage," and ministers will keep working through details before the November summit in Manila (and possibly into Singapore's 2027 chairmanship).

Read more: CNA (regional fuel stockpile), AsiaOne (2027 chairmanship), Business Times (44.83M barrels)

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Top Marks, Asterisk Included

FATF gave Singapore its highest monitoring rating on May 6, giving the Republic a "regular follow-up," label, which is the watchdog's most favorable category. Seven of 11 immediate outcomes were reported to be "substantially effective," the other four were rated "moderately effective." Thirty-eight of 40 technical compliance recommendations were judged compliant or largely compliant. The two that weren't covered sanctions and oversight of certain sectors, the same pressure points that let a S$3 billion ($2.3 billion) laundering operation run through the system before anyone (apparently) noticed in 2023 - to be fair, the review period was from 2020 to July 2025, so the bust is baked into the score, not buried by it.

Read more: Business Times

Spare the Rod and Spoil the Bully

Starting in 2027, male students aged nine and older can be caned at school for serious bullying, including cyberbullying, Education Minister Desmond Lee says. The maximum is three strokes for each incident, will requires the approval of the schoo’s principal, and can only be administered by authorised teachers after other measures have failed. The policy is the result of of a year-long ministry review triggered by several school bullying incidents last year, and applies only to boys (Singapore does not cane women for any offense). Girls who commit similar offences face detention, suspension, or reduced conduct grades. Lee said the approach is based on research showing children "make better choices when there are clear boundaries enforced by firm, meaningful consequences." The WHO maybe disagrees. In an August 2025 report, they said that corporal punishment in schools is "alarmingly widespread" and warned its consequences "can last a lifetime and undermine physical and mental health, education, and social and occupational functioning."

Read more: The Guardian (WHO child count), VnExpress (safety protocols), CNN (Michael Fay precedent)

Tourist Receipts Beat Expectations

Tourism receipts were a record S$32.8 billion ($25 billion) in 2025, blowing past STB's S$29 billion to S$30.5 billion forecast and clearing the bar set for 2026. The 16.9 million visitors spent across every category, but the real money was in MICE, where receipts were up 35 percent to S$2.3 billion ($1.76 billion), up from S$1.7 billion ($1.3 billion). STB now says it want's S$4.5 billion ($3.4 billion) in MICE spending by 2040. The government is adding S$740 million ($566 million) to the Tourism Development Fund for the next five years, more than double the S$300 million top-up in 2024.

Read more: Business Times (minister quotes), Business Times (Orchard Road tender)

Money Keeps Showing Up at the Door

Deposits were a record S$1.61 trillion ($1.2 trillion) in February, the same month the Straits Times Index crossed 5,000 for the first time. The local asset management business grew 12 percent y-o-y to S$6.07 trillion ($4.5 trillion) in 2024, and the number of single-family offices was numbered 2,000 at year-end, (up 43 percent). The archetypal new client is a Northeast Asian tech founder with US$50 million who restructured his family holdings through a corporate vehicle in SG without actually moving, drawn by English common law succession planning and a tax system that won’t punish him for living elsewhere.

Read more: South China Morning Post

More Seats to Europe, but They’re Tired

Singapore Airlines will run a record 128 weekly flights to 15 European cities this November, including Madrid for the first time since 2004, with 38 weekly services to London soaking up capacity that’s been vacated by Gulf carriers hamstrung by their regional conflict. Less convenient is what passengers will be treated to once they get on-board. The S$1.1 billion ($840 million) cabin retrofit that was originally promised for Q2 2026 has slipped to Q1 2027 at the earliest, with the new First Class on an open-ended timeline. SIA blames supply chain constraints and a seat certification delay. Safran, a contender for the new Business Class seat, delivered just 2,632 business class seats globally in all of 2025.

Read more: Simpleflying (128 flights, Madrid), Mainlymiles (cabin retrofit delay)

Hot Desks in a Cold Market

JustCo filed a preliminary prospectus with MAS on Thursday, putting the flex-office operator (backed by GIC and Frasers Property) in line for a local listing on the bourse. The company saw a S$2.7 million ($2.1 million) net profit in 2025 after two straight years of losses of S$22.6 million ($17.3 million), on revenue of S$144.2 million ($110.3 million). Cornerstone investors include JPMorgan Asset Management, Avanda, Japan's Amova, and Maybank Securities. DBS and UBS are joint issue managers. Pricing, valuation, and share count are all still placeholders. JustCo has 54 office centers in 12 cities, and 29,422 of its 37,500 workstations were occupied as of the end of last year.

Read more: Mingtiandi

Bankruptcy Judges Swap Numbers

Singapore and Indonesia's supreme courts have signed an MOU that will give judges in both countries a channel to coordinate on the same insolvency or restructuring case(s). It’s first arrangement of this type between the two countries. Signed on March 30 on the sidelines of a workshop in Bali, the agreement extends the UNCITRAL Model Law. In the new system, each court will be expected to assign a liaison, likely a senior registrar or judge, who will use prescribed rules on language, interpretation and response times to help shepherd the process.

Read more: Business Times

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Wong's Two-Front War

Lawrence Wong used the May Day Rally to deliver a two-pronged warning for Singapore on the Hormuz block and on AI. He said that the oil disruption could end up being worse than the 1970s oil shocks, and that AI is set to hollow out the first rung of the career ladder for the youngest workers. GDP shrank 0.3 percent QoQ in Q1 against revised Q4 2025 figures, MAS has tightened, and inflation forecasts for 2026 have been revised upwards into a range of 1.5 to 2.5 percent. Wong's line that "we may not be able to protect every job, but we will protect every worker" got applause, but the policy architecture around it is news. The Ministry of Manpower, NTUC and the Singapore National Employers Federation have come together to create a Tripartite Jobs Council that’s going to manage oversight of enterprise AI adoption, training and support for at-risk workers.

Read more: Business Times ($1B package), Business Times (National AI Council), Yahoo Finance (Wong), Business Times ($500M eldercare), Business Times (TJC three pillars)

Chips Cover for Crippled Refineries

The split inside Q1's headline number is where the action is as electronics output is up 30% year-on-year in March on semiconductor demand, as the chemicals cluster (about 1.7% of GDP) is running at half speed. Q1 GDP was reported at 4.6% YoY, down from a 5.7% pace in H2 2025. More than 70% of crude imports are from the Middle East, and with refineries operating at 50-60% capacity, the petrochemical sector is essentially parked. Gartner expects global semiconductor revenue to be $1.32 trillion in 2026, up from earlier estimates of “only” a trillion, and DBS has maintained buy ratings on UMS Integration, AEM Holdings, and Frencken Group. But chipmakers have their own Middle East exposure in helium, which is a necessary input in semiconductor manufacturing and also largely supplied from the Middle East. With full-year GDP expected at 3%, growth concerns could keep MAS on hold in July despite its earlier tightening and a core inflation forecast that’s gone up between 1.5 and 2.5% from 1-2%.

Read more: Sbr (refinery capacity), Sbr (semi revenue)

Wellington Locks In the Pantry

Singapore and New Zealand signed what's being called the world's first legally binding bilateral supply chain resilience agreement on Monday. The deal covers food, fuel, healthcare, chemicals and construction materials. It’s come at a fortuitous time - when hands were first pumped on the deal in October, nobody expected the Strait of Hormuz to be a live problem four months later. NZ PM Christopher Luxon told RNZ the treaty was already in effect before the ink dried, and he brought Finance Minister Nicola Willis and Trade Minister Todd McClay along to visit Singapore's refineries in person. Two-way trade is about US$6.5 billion, and Singapore is the second-largest source of investment into New Zealand.

Read more: Business Times (six CSP pillars), AsiaOne (Willis fuel meetings), Rnz Co NZ (NZ trade)

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Mainland Money Finds a New Home

Mainland Chinese firms have gone from a rounding error to the second-largest source of fixed-asset investment as they raised their share from 2.5% to 21% of the S$14.16 billion ($11.07 billion) total in 2025. American investors slid from first to third as their share collapsed from 55.5% to 17.3%. Europe now sits in the top spot at around 25%.

Read more: South China Morning Post

The Pump, the Pantry, the Pinch

RON95 fuel is up nearly 20 percent and diesel has gone up more than 50 percent since the Hormuz blockade started to bite in late February, pushing a typical 50-liter fill-up from S$142.50 ($106) to S$171 ($128). The squeeze, unfortunately, doesn't stop at the pump. A SingStat analysis of supermarket pricing data, released April 29, found shrinkflation is on the rise for commonly bought home items, with instant coffee/ tea, laundry detergent, ice cream, milk powder and diapers leading the way. So, for consumers this means the same price for a smaller box.

Read more: AsiaOne (airline fares, utilities), Business Times (unit pricing pilot)

SGX Wants to See the Pay Stub

SGX RegCo's public consultation window, opened April 22, is seeking input on changes that would force listed companies to spell out the metrics behind executive pay, their dividend policies, and how they talk to investors. About two-thirds of the largest issuers currently don't disclose having an investor relations policy, and (an overlapping, but different) two-thirds of listed firms don’t currently share the metrics that tether (or not?) executive pay to long-term value. Right now, companies need only report directors' and CEO remuneration totals, with "comply-or-explain" nudges doing the rest. Under the proposal, companies would have to publish the specific KPIs that drive pay decisions and explain how those targets align with the creation of shareholder value. SGX RegCo chief executive Tan Boon Gin said (we imagine dryly), there is "room for disclosure requirements to level up."

Read more: CNA

More Gas Now, Hydrogen Maybe Later

The Energy Market Authority has put out its third call for gas turbines in three years, this time wanting up to 1,800 MW of new combined-cycle capacity between now and 2032. The regulator is forecasting peak demand of 9.6 to 11.4 GW (seems like a wide spread, but forecasting is difficult?) by 2031, growing 2.4 to 4.8 percent yearly on the back of semiconductors and data center needs. Interestingly, the turbines are required to be hydrogen-ready, but the actual fuel, for now, remains gas. Proposals for a 2031 unit are due Jun 24, 2026, bids for 2032 units are required by Sep 30.

Read more: Business Times

Four Months Down to One

From January 2027, construction firms won't need to force new workers from China and Thailand to take overseas competency tests before getting entry to Singapore in a move that is expected to shorten the hiring process from four months to one. National Development Minister Chee Hong Tat shared the change at the BuildSG Lead Summit in response to industry complaints that overseas certification was slow and, in any event, often mismatched workers' actual deployment needs. Workers will instead be tested on trade knowledge and practical skills once they arrive in Singapore (companies will need to reserve a test slot before arrival). South Asian source countries, including India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Myanmar, will follow in January 2028.

Read more: Business Times

Silicon Box Squares Up

Singapore startup Silicon Box expects to ship more than a billion chiplet-based devices this year by ditching round wafers for square panels, which waste less surface area. Founded in May 2021, they shipped 250 million devices by the end of Q1 and expect 1.5 billion cumulative units to be sold by October. Q1 revenue has been reported to be about three-quarters of the full-year 2025 tally, and booked order volume is running at 10 to 12 times 2025 levels.

Read more: Business Times

Hotels Cash In As Missiles Fly

Tourist arrivals rose 2.8% to 4.4 million in Q1 2026, and hotel RevPAR climbed 4.8% to S$228.45 ($175) in the quarter. February (CNY) did most of the work with mainland China arrivals up 61.3%, and room revenue inflated 13.3% that month alone. STB's Poh Chi Chuan says recent business events are a picture of "strong participation and healthy attendance," waving off MICE jitters. Average occupancy was just over 83%, up from 80.54% a year earlier. Total room revenue for the quarter was reported S$1.36 billion ($1.04 billion).

Read more: Business Times (ARR & STB CEO), Business Times (MICE resilience)

AI Pads Paychecks, Picks the Locks

Software engineers with AI skills are now earning 13 to 25 percent more than peers without them, as per SCMP’s reporting. Less helpfully, the same technology was reported to have been involved in 84 percent of reported Singapore security breaches here over the past 12 months. Sixty percent of Singapore-based organizations were breached at least once in the past year, and 92 percent of Singaporean leaders (the highest share of any region surveyed) fear "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks on data that, while encrypted today, may be easy to decipher tomorrow.

Read more: South China Morning Post (AI salary premium), Frontier Enterprise (breach visibility gap)

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Hormuz Is the Warm-Up Act

Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan didn't mince words at CNBC's Converge Live event on Wednesday. He said that if the U.S. and China go to war in the Pacific, "what you are seeing in the Strait of Hormuz will be a dry run." The comment came along with a reminder that the Strait of Malacca, at its narrowest, is only two nautical miles wide, compared to Hormuz's 21. Iran's parliament is reportedly drafting legislation to put tolls on Hormuz shipping, and Balakrishnan was asked whether that playbook might be used in Singapore. His answer was clear in that no tolls, no interdiction, no suspension of transit passage was possible, because Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia share an interest in keeping the strait open, and all parties have been told Singapore wants to operate on the basis of UNCLOS. "We will be useful, but we will not be made use of," Balakrishnan said.

Read more: CNBC (U.S.-Singapore trade), Yahoo (neutrality)

Hormuz Bill Arrives, SMEs Pay First

The Singapore Index of Inflation Expectations survey, published April 22, found that nearly 9 in 10 respondents expect prices to go up over the next year, up from 83.4 percent in December. “Geopolitical conflict” was the top reason. The Singapore Business Federation's poll of 254 firms tells an even worse story at street level. Two-thirds are reporting “moderate-to-severe” hits from the Iran war, with energy costs the most-common complaint. The split between large firms and SMEs is the interesting bit. Seventy eight percent of large companies say they are confident they’ll be able to manage the volatility, only a third of SMEs say the same.

Read more: Business Times (core inflation), Business Times (salary fears), Business Times (viability)

CPF Comes for the Local Bourse

Citi reckons the new CPF life-cycle investment scheme, launching in 2028, could result in an additional S$6 to S$9 billion ($4.4 to $6.6 billion) moving into Singapore equities every year, if 10 to 15 percent of the S$58 billion in yearly CPF contributions gets allocated to stocks. Only 3 percent of CPF's S$661 billion in cash funds currently sits in equities in the existing investment scheme, the lowest pension equity exposure in Asia-Pacific (the regional range runs from 10 to 48 percent).

Read more: Business Times

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Robots Wanted, No Experience Necessary

MPA and PSA want proposals to run autonomous container feeder vessels between Singapore's port gateways like Pasir Panjang and Tuas. The inter-terminal shuffle is currently handled by smaller craft at sea or prime movers on land. The call, which came April 22 during Singapore Maritime Week, asks applicants to address navigational safety, traffic management, cybersecurity, interaction with conventional vessels, and "viable business models." The week also brought more than S$100 million ($75 million) in R&D commitments over five years, a new Oceans-X data exchange platform, and a maritime technology roadmap built around autonomous port operations, alternative fuels, smart ships, and intelligent port services.

Read more: Business Times (minister quotes), Business Times (Oceans-X), Business Times (EOI requirements), Business Times (AI rollout)

Cross-Border Trains Stretch Their Legs

RTSO ran multiple trains together at higher speeds on April 24, validating regenerative braking and other systems on the Johor Bahru-Singapore link. Two days earlier, Singapore's Acting Transport Minister Jeffrey Siow and Malaysia's Anthony Loke toured Woodlands North together, where automated immigration gates appeared to be switched on for testing. Loke has floated fares of around S$5 to S$7 ($3.70 to $5.20) per trip, operations are expected to begin toward the end of this year.

Read more: AsiaOne

Superjumbo Skips Dubai, Heads Down Under

Singapore Airlines has reassigned its A380 from the suspended Dubai route to Melbourne, restoring superjumbo service on the Australian run for the first time in nearly three years. Dubai will remain offline until at least June; a tentative return is penciled in for late October if geopolitics cooperate. Sydney and Melbourne between them now get three daily A380 flights.

Read more: Aviationa2z

The AI Agent Has Left the Building

IMDA's Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI, published in January, and the Cyber Security Agency's companion paper "Securing Agentic AI" together are one of the first times any jurisdiction has published guidance for AI systems that both advise and act. The papers describe browsing, executing code, sending communications, and chaining decisions through enterprise workflows before a human can get its hands dirty.

Read more: Startupfortune

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MAS Blinks First as Hormuz Hits Home

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) tightened monetary policy on April 14 for the first time since October 2022, steepening the slope of the S$NEER policy band as the Iran war's energy shock starts working through the economy. The tightening was expected (15/18 economists polled by Bloomberg called it), but an inflation forecast change sting. MAS raised its core and headline CPI range to 1.5-2.5 per cent for 2026, up from the 1-2 per cent range it set three months ago. The growth picture is murkier. Q1 GDP came in at 4.6 per cent y-o-y against a median forecast of 5.8 per cent, and contracted 0.3 per cent on a seasonally adjusted quarterly basis. Manufacturing led the pullback, swinging from 4.5 per cent sequential growth to a 4.9 per cent contraction. The full-year outlook looks like it will come in at 2.5 to 3.5 per cent, MAS will update its own forecast again next month. At least one more tightening move is expected this year, analysts are split between deciding if that will come in July or October.

Read more: Business Times (Brent figure), Business Times (July vs October), Business Times (MTI release date), Business Times (sector breakdown)

Chips Do the Heavy Lifting

Non-oil domestic exports rose 15.3% in March, the seventh straight month of growth, blowing past analyst forecasts of 8.1% on the back of a 74% year-on-year electronics increase. Semiconductors were the engine: integrated circuit shipments more than doubled, up 113.8%, with chips alone making up S$1.7 billion ($1.3 billion) of the S$3.1 billion ($2.3 billion) in electronics exports for the month. AI demand is carrying the number, TSMC already has upped its 2026 revenue outlook on it. The Iran war, now in its second month, hasn't visibly hampered any of this yet, but there is a catch in the that’s waiting. The sector runs on helium, and Qatar is one of the world's biggest suppliers. The Singapore Semiconductor Industry Association says nobody is squawking yet, but a prolonged conflict would eventually squeeze margins. Non-electronics exports slipped 0.6%, a much narrower drop than February's 6.9%.

Read more: Straits Times (exports), Business Times (disk/PC figures), Business Times (industry quotes)

To USTR: Check Your Math

MTI sent two written submissions to the USTR on April 15, pushing back on Section 301 investigations into forced labor and industrial overcapacity. The numbers it brought are awkward for Washington. The US ran a goods surplus of $3.6 billion and $29.6 billion respectively in 2025. Singapore is home to 6,600 American companies which support more than 250,000 US jobs, and that the State Department's own 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report which puts Singapore in its Tier 1 (that’s the good one!). Pharmaceuticals, the lone sector where the US runs a deficit with Singapore, saw its trade gap narrow from $17.7 billion in 2024 to $12.9 billion in 2025.

Read more: Business Times (capacity utilization), Business Times (jobs)

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Changi Shrugs Off Middle East Woes

Changi notched 17.6 million passenger movements in Q1 2026, up 2.3% year-on-year, a number that looks unremarkable until you factor in that it absorbed a collapse in Middle East traffic of 80% in March alone. The airport didn't paper over the gap so much as route around it. Vietnam and China were the standout performers in the top ten markets, rising 26.5% and 17.7% respectively. Airlines added roughly 90 additional flights to cities including Frankfurt, London, Paris and Sydney during the March disruption. The top five markets for the quarter were China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia and India, a lineup that tells its own story about where demand is coming from. Airfreight throughput was 517,000 tons for the quarter, up 7.6% year-on-year; exports and imports were both higher than Q1 2025. The trailing 12-month passenger count through March was 70.4 million, the highest ever recorded over any 12-month window at Changi.

Read more: ftnnews

Small States Pick Up the Megaphone

Burhan Gafoor, Singapore's Permanent Representative to the UN, gave a joint statement at the General Assembly on April 16 on behalf of Fiji, Jamaica, Malta and Singapore, calling on all parties to restore unimpeded transit through the Strait of Hormuz. The presentation came after Russia and China vetoed a Security Council resolution on April 7 that had cleared 11-2 (Pakistan and Colombia abstained). The four countries presented their position frankly by saying that they had worked substantively to negotiating UNCLOS in 1982 and continue to have an abiding interest in its enforcement. Iran has largely closed the strait to non-Iranian shipping since US-Israeli airstrikes began on February 28, and while an April 8 ceasefire was meant to temporarily reopen it, follow-up talks in Pakistan ended without a deal.

Read more: CNA

Fuel Insurance Policy Gets an AUS Signature

Four ministers from Singapore and Australia said on April 17 that the two countries have "substantially concluded" a Protocol on Economic Resilience and Essential Supplies, a formal add-on to their existing FTA. The protocol commits both sides to refrain from export restrictions on petroleum oils including diesel and LNG during supply disruptions. The same package formalises the Australia-Singapore Economic Resilience Dialogue as the working mechanism. It will enter into force once both governments complete their domestic processes.

Read more: CNA

You Can't Birth Them Overnight

Singapore tallied only 27,500 births in 2025, the lowest number ever, as the fertility rate dropped to a flaccid 0.87. DPM Gan Kim Yong told Parliament the population will start shrinking in the early 2040s if nothing changes, saying it’s an "existential challenge." The government's near-term answer is giving 25,000 to 30,000 new citizenships, and an additional ~40,000 new PRs, in each of the next five years. That will add up to 70,000 people yearly. "You can't overnight give birth to young people," Gan said.

Read more: Says

One Shovel Sends Five Thousand Offline

A contractor drilling bored piles for the North-South Corridor hit fibre cables at just before 11 AM on April 18, knocking out broadband for about 5,000 users in Ang Mo Kio, Bishan, Sengkang and Punggol for 20 hours. Singtel, StarHub, M1 and MyRepublic all went down together. The damage went further than most noticed, as LTA's bus ETA system runs on the same fibre, and stops in the affected districts started showing phantom arrival times. NetLink Trust crews worked through wet weather overnight to get service back by 7am Sunday. IMDA is investigating under the Telecommunications Act, the same law that fined subcontractor 2K International a hefty S$314,000 ($233,000) earlier this year for a nearly identical 19-hour outage in 2019.

Read more: CNA (restoration), Straits Times (benchmark stats), CNA (outage timeline), CNA (bus ETA)

695 Speeders a Day, Footpaths Aren't Much Safer

Traffic deaths came in at a 10-year high of 149 last year (up from 142 the year before), and speeding cases rose from 201,358 to 253,550. That’s almost 700 drivers knicked daily. On the footpaths, LTA netted 308 cyclist and PMD offenses in a single month and impounded 100 devices, drawing more than 270 online comments, many saying that the situation is much worse than the numbers indicate. Some commenters claimed errant riders get tipped off through Telegram and WhatsApp groups before operations start, with one asserting that more than 90% of scofflaws fled once word got out.

Read more: Yahoo News SG (policy), The Independent Singapore (public evasion)

War Jitters Create Penthouse Shoppers

Luxury condos in Singapore's Core Central Region priced at S$5 million ($3.8 million) and up were traded 75 times in Q1 2026, the strongest quarter since Q4 2023, when 84 changed hands. New sales totaled S$400 million ($305 million), up from S$330 million in Q4 2025. River Modern's launch accounted for 38 of those deals. Buyers are looking atl ocal penthouses as safe-haven assets as the Middle East burns. Good Class Bungalow deals told a different story, sliding to four transactions from nine, though one in the Gallop Road area still raised S$31.5 million ($24 million).

Read more: Business Times

Overqualified and Loving It

Nearly one in five resident workers held jobs below their qualification level in 2025, up from 16.3 percent a decade ago, and about nine in ten of are there by choice. The Ministry of Manpower and NTUC put out studies on April 14 suggesting this turn of events is a feature, not a bug. They say that workers are choosing to trade credential-matched roles for more stability, flexible hours, and whatever else sparks their fancy. The involuntary slice, which is made up of workers who want better-matched work but can't find it, was reported at just 1.7 percent. Workers under 30 are the most mismatched, with 29.7 percent of that cohort reportedly overqualified.

Read more: Business Times

Ten Cents to Save the Can

Return Right, the national deposit return scheme first floated by a citizen workgroup in 2019, went live on the simple premise of a 10-cent refundable deposit on eligible bottles and cans. BCRS Ltd, a not-for-profit set up by industry and licensed by the National Environment Agency, is running the operation, built to handle more than a billion containers annually to recover as much as 16,000 tonnes of material. Containers that show the Deposit Mark are coming into the market now, existing stock without the mark is still on shelves and won't qualify for refunds.

Read more: Indexbox

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Band-Aid for the Energy Burn

The government rolled out a support package worth close to S$1 billion ($780 million) on Tuesday, in the biggest emergency fiscal response since the pandemic. Corporate tax rebates were increased from 40 to 50 percent, with further cash grants bringing the total cap to S$40,000 ($31,200) per company. A S$500 CDC voucher tranche is getting pulled forward from January 2027 to June, and a one-off Cost-of-Living Special Payment will be increased by S$200. Platform workers, taxi and private-hire drivers will get direct S$200 cash payouts. Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam told Parliament the Republic has enough fuel and food but said that higher prices and fewer choices are likely, in addition to noting that even after hostilities stop, oil and gas export capacity won't recover quickly because of damaged infrastructure in the Gulf.

Read more: Business Times (corporate rebate), Business Times (reserve adequacy), Business Times (facility cooling), Business Times (price freeze), Business Times (bus fare subsidy)

Tariff Wave Two: The One That Bites

Washington switched tools after the Supreme Court killed Liberation Day tariffs in February, replacing emergency powers with Sections 232 and 301. Section 232 lets the US tariff entire product categories on national security grounds, from semiconductors to pharmaceuticals, and Section 301 puts a bulls-eye on countries that are considered to be using unfair trade practices. Unlike the temporary 10 per cent import surcharge that was placed under Section 122, both will put restrictions into domestic law, making them more difficult to later negotiate away. Singapore weathered 2025's first wave, mustering 5 per cent growth against downgraded forecasts of as low as zero, but the new American strategy will hit the export engine directly. Even before any actual tariffs are applied, the uncertainty is damaging. Trade with the United States accounted for roughly a quarter of Singapore GDP in 2024.

Read more: Straits Times

Gan Goes to Washington

Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong is in the US through April 17, meeting cabinet secretaries and members of Congress as the two countries celebrate six decades of diplomatic ties. He’s pulling up just as Washington is sleuthing to find alleged excess semiconductor capacity. Gan is expected to launch Enterprise Singapore's fourth US office in Austin, join IMF Spring Meetings in his role as MAS chairman, and talk about economic cooperation with officials in Texas. Bilateral trade in goods and services was $317.1 billion in 2024 (Washington runs a consistent surplus).

Read more: CNA (Austin office), AsiaOne (Semafor conference), Business Times (USTR details)

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Fuel Buddies Make It Official

"As long as upstream supplies continue", was Prime Minister Lawrence Wong's asterisk when he and Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese signed an agreement this week to keep LNG and refined fuels flowing between the two countries. Australia supplies 32 percent of Singapore’s LNG, and the Republic is responsible for the supply of 55 percent of Australia's petrol, 22 percent of its jet fuel, and 15 percent of its diesel. Wong assured Albanese that fuel exports won't be restricted, even as the crisis squeezes crude supplies; at least one Jurong Island refinery is running at 60 percent capacity. Both sides plan to make the arrangement legally binding and are expected to have further ministerial dialogues on energy resilience, but neither leader went home with any new shipments in hand.

Read more: Business Times (32% LNG figure), Abc Net (maximum efforts pledge), Sbs (November 17 date), Abc Net (60% refinery capacity), The Guardian ($10B petrol value)

No Toll on the High Seas

"It is not a privilege to be granted by any bordering state, it is not a licence to be supplicated for, it is not a toll to be paid." Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan told Parliament on April 7 that transit passage through international straits is a right under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, not a bargaining chip, in a powerful statement of principle. Balakrishnan called on all sides to stop attacks on non-belligerent states and engage in good faith negotiations for a lasting resolution.

Read more: AsiaOne (UNCLOS statement), Business Times

Flag Carrier Grounded by Fuel Math

Jet fuel at roughly double the cost is was at the beginning of this year has cut Singapore Airlines' quarterly net profit by more than half. The carrier has reduced routes, hiked surcharges, and cut capacity through May despite healthy passenger loads through February, wiping out the advantage of its historically good work on hedging fuel costs. Management says that operating conditions are going to remain tough through June, contradicting earlier hopes expectations and sending the stock price lower.

Read more: Nomadlawyer (summer forecast), Thetraveler (cancellation timing), Aviationa2z (Dhaka expansion)

Bull Market with an Empty Dance Card

A 23% climb in the Straits Times index through 2025 (the best showing since 2009), supported the benchmark index’s move through 5,000 for the first time in February, but the exchange can barely get anyone to show up for a debut. The number of IPOs rose from six in 2024 to 16 last year (less impressive against Hong Kong's 119). Delistings and buyouts pushed the roster to a 20-year low of 605 names in October as the island's biggest names keep listing elsewhere: Grab chose Nasdaq in 2021, and GLP, which delisted in SG in 2018, is expected to relist in Hong Kong later this year.

Read more: Financial Times

Six Figures for a Car Permit

COE premiums jumped in all categories during April's first bidding round, with mainstream cars hitting S$118,000 ($87,700), up 5.5 per cent, and commercial vehicles topping the S$80k level ($59,500), prices not seen since October 2023. Motorcycles cracked S$10,000 for the first time since 2024. Legacy Japanese and German brands have been clearing stock ahead of Parf rebate cuts that took effect in February, but Chinese EV demand has staying strong.

Read more: Business Times

Robotaxis Roll Into Punggol

Grab and ComfortDelGro got the government's nod to partner with Chinese autonomous vehicle makers WeRide and Pony.ai to test robotaxis on public roads in Punggol; the transport ministry expectes 100 to 150 vehicles by the end of the year. The vehicles will ride with safety officers to start, but the plan is to eventually go fully driverless, matching what's already running in Beijing, Shenzhen, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Read more: South China Morning Post

East Side Gets a Hospital, Eventually

Health Minister Ong Ye Kung announced plans to release government land for a new private not-for-profit acute hospital in eastern Singapore with 300 to 400 beds. It would be the first such land release in nearly two decades. The tender will use a fixed-price model where bidders compete on care quality and cost efficiency rather than the price of the land, a deliberate shift after the 2008 tender for Mount Elizabeth Novena Hospital saw S$1.25 billion ($940 million) of a S$2 billion ($1.5 billion) project go to just buying the land, as staff was poached from public hospitals. The ministry wants to pick a winner in the second half of this year.

Read more: Business Times (tender timeline), The Independent Singapore (Mount Alvernia context)

Blaze on the Docks, but Business as Usual

A container fire on Evergreen Marine's Ever Lenient burned for more than eight hours at PSA Pasir Panjang Terminal on Friday before being extinguished overnight. The 334.8 meter vessel, London-registered and built in 2014, saw no injuries or leaks (oil or otherwise). PSA is now offloading the affected containers while investigators try to figure out what sparked it, but port operations at the world's second-busiest container hub didn’t skip a beat.

Read more: CNA (extinguishment), Business Times (ship specs)

Seven Centuries of Cargo Proves the Point

Archaeologists say they’ve documented more than 2,350 shards of 14th-century Chinese blue-and-white porcelain from a single shipwreck off the coast. It’s the largest collection of this kind ever found in a single vessel. The cargo has been dated to some time around 1340 and 1352, when imperial restrictions had already eased up, but before civil war shut down Jingdezhen's kilns. The ceramics match similar pieces that have been excavated from Temasek trading sites nearby. At least 300 bowls made the voyage before sinking, proof that the island which became Singapore was at the centre of long-distance maritime trade networks seven centuries before it became the world's busiest transshipment port.

Read more: Earth

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Hormuz Hangover Hits Home

Singapore has dusted off its crisis playbook. Prime Minister Lawrence Wong activated the Homefront Crisis Ministerial Committee - dormant for years, and now suddenly essential - to coordinate the Middle East fallout across five ministries. K Shanmugam, chairing the effort, warned Saturday that food prices are going to have to climb alongside fuel as fertilizer and shipping costs go up, but the government hasn't put any consumption curbs into action yet. The Energy Market Authority isn't sugarcoating what's coming either as its telling everyone to prepare for "further and potentially sharper increases" in electricity price adjustments as about a quarter of all seaborne oil remains cut off by the Strait of Hormuz. Wong plans to bring forward Budget 2026 support measures when Parliament sits April 7. Details are under wraps, but the urgency is clear.

Read more: CNA (stockpile duration), Business Times (Australia/NZ partnerships), Business Times (95% gas dependency), Business Times (pipeline diversification)

Tiger and Yeo's Brew Their Exit

Tiger Beer maker Asia Pacific Breweries told workers on March 24 it's sending large-scale production to Malaysia and Vietnam. A week later, another local beverage maker, Yeo Hiap Seng followed suit. It will consolidate its canned drinks manufacturing across the Causeway and cut 9 percent of the local headcount. Two home-grown brands walking out the door in the same fortnight is not only coincidence. Post-pandemic increases in energy, logistics, and raw material costs have made Singapore's factory floor brutally uncompetitive for volume manufacturing. Both companies promise (for now) that they'll keep headquarters here. The Republic has been drifting away from labour-intensive manufacturing for decades, but technology is now making it trivially easy to produce across the Causeway while doing the branding from Raffles Place; these two might be a canary in the coal mine for the tipping point.

Read more: Business Times (Yeo financials, severance), Business Times (industry-wide exodus)

OCBC Joins the Hundred-Billion Club

OCBC's shares hit a record S$22.65 on Wednesday, getting its market cap to top S$100 billion for the first time and making it only the second Singapore-listed company to join that club after DBS. The rally is the crescendo of an impressive catch-up as OCBC lagged DBS through most of 2025, then delivered what Macquarie says is the strongest Q4 from the three local banks. Macquarie now says OCBC is its top local bank play. Citi still prefers DBS but has kept its buy on OCBC.

Read more: Business Times

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Four Down in the Chip Probe

Singapore charged a fourth executive in its Nvidia chip export probe last week, pulling Aperia Cloud Services CFO Jenny Lim into the dock alongside the firm's CEO and head of sales. It is alleged that the trio told Dell that local affiliate Aperia International would be the end user for servers (which possibly contained export-controlled Nvidia chips), when in fact the servers were actually going to be sent to Malaysia. Nine people have been arrested so far. The probe picked up speed after US lawmakers singled out Singapore in January, demanding more from countries they accused of letting chips slip through to China. Aperia Cloud Services, barely three years old, had marketed itself as Southeast Asia's first qualified Nvidia cloud partner.

Read more: Business Times

City-State Wants to Be the World's Vault

Singapore wants to babysit the world's gold. The government is pitching central banks on keeping their bullion reserves here in a play to pull gold-trading gravity away from Hong Kong. Officials have been keen with precious metals ambitions before, but parking sovereign reserves is a new level of aspiration. Central banks, naturally, don't stash gold lightly, and the bet is that Singapore's political stability, legal framework, and tax treatment can pry business from a Hong Kong as it navigates increasing oversight from Beijing.

Read more: Bloomberg

Lower Premiums, Costlier Care

Insurance premiums for many have dropped (blessed relief!), but out-of-pocket costs have likely gone up (cursed market!). New Integrated Shield Plan riders that kicked in on April 1 reduce premiums by 30 to 84 percent, but policyholders now will be responsible for deductibles of at least S$1,500 ($1,110) and co-payment caps that have doubled to S$6,000 ($4,450). The government-mandated redesign will affect about three million Singaporeans and comes as medical cost inflation is projected to reach 16.9 percent in 2026. That rate would make Singapore the priciest healthcare market in Asia-Pacific. Insurers are trying to sell the lower premiums as a fair trade for adjusted risk, of course, but it seems that anyone who though "full coverage" meant never opening their wallet is getting a lesson in fine print.

Read more: Business Times (savings percentages), Business Times (inflation projection)

rPump Fiction

Cnergy's three petrol stations price 95-octane gasoline at S$2.40 a liter, which is more than a dollar less than Shell's price of S$3.47. At first, it appears like the deal of the year, but Shell customers that stack their loyalty awards only end up paying about S$2.53. The difference between the sticker price and the effective price shows something interesting about how fuel retail actually works in Singapore, where the billboard rates are mostly theater, and the actual competition plays out in the details.

Read more: Business Times

422 Landlords Caught Hiding Rent

Singapore's tax authority clawed back S$4.8 million ($3.7 million) from 422 property owners who (whoops!) forgot to report their rental income. The haul nearly quadruples the S$1.3 million take from the last audit. IRAS investigated 793 landlords through 2024 and 2025 after noticing filing discrepancies. Some owners claim to have thought that paying property tax covered the rental income too. It, sadly for them, does not. Penalties for mistaken returns can be as much as 200 percent of the undercharged tax, fines of up to S$5,000 and three years in the pokey. If it is decided that evasion was deliberate, scofflaws risk fines of up to S$50,000, penalties up to 400 percent, and five years behind bars.

Read more: VnExpress

Terry Xu's S$420,000 Tab

The High Court ordered Online Citizen editor Terry Xu to pay S$210,000 ($156,000) to each of two Cabinet ministers - K Shanmugam and Tan See Leng for a December 2024 article questioning their property transactions. It was found that Xu “acted with malice” since he ignored legal warnings, breached an injunction, AND THEN continued to double down on the claims in four follow-up posts. For those keeping score, that's two defamation judgments against the same editor in five years.

Read more: Business Times

Belgians Bet on the Island

Belgian logistics firm Katoen Natie is sinking S$60 million ($45 million) into a new automated warehouse on Jurong Island in order to expand its petrochemical storage capacity by more than a fifth. The plan looks like it’s going ahead despite (or maybe because of), Middle East disruptions that are rattling chemical supply chains. The investment brings Katoen Natie's total Singapore investment to around S$250 million ($186 million). The warehouse will create 25 jobs.

Read more: Business Times (Middle East impact), Business Times (specs)

Punggol's Robot Taxis Ditch the Test Track

Autonomous shuttles are rolling onto public roads in Punggol this month, almost a decade after Singapore's first driverless vehicle tests. Two partnerships are behind the launch. Grab is hooked up with WeRide, and ComfortDelGro is riding with Pony.ai. Routes are as long as 12 km, and connect housing blocks to Oasis Terraces and Punggol Plaza. Prices begin at zero; fares are expected later this year as the LTA evaluates scaling beyond Punggol.

Read more: Business Times

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Hormuz Choke Hits Home

The Strait of Hormuz closure is hammering Singapore from all sides - from the pump to the trading floor. Bunker fuel prices have nearly doubled to $1,000, Shell has pushed diesel past $4 a litre, (a penny shy of its premium V-Power price), and fuel oil prices are swinging so fast that OTC quotes are only "valid for one to two seconds," as one energy disputes lawyer put it. Brent crude is holding above US$100. Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan framed by saying the Hormuz closure is "in a sense, an Asian crisis," a vulnerability long known but never tested to this extreme.

Read more: Bastillepost (regional vulnerability), Business Times (trading chaos), AsiaOne (pump price), Business Times (hiring slowdown), Business Times (factory contraction)

Beijing Locks the Back Door on Singwashing

Meta's $2 billion acquisition of Manus AI last year looked like evidence of a path for Chinese founders to sidestep both Washington and Beijing by opening up shop in Singapore. The CCP has other ideas. Beijing has reportedly prohibited Manus co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao from leaving the country and begun a review into whether the sale violated technology export laws, freezing a deal that had captivated Silicon Valley. The company had moved its headquarters and core teams to Singapore in 2025, while getting financial backing from San Francisco's Benchmark and other foreign investors. The money drew flak from both U.S. lawmakers who'd banned American investment in Chinese AI firms, and players in Beijing. "The path taken by Manus: people will not go down that route anymore," says Wayne Shiong of Argo Venture Partners. It seems like the next play will be to start-up outside China from day one, instead of trying to make a mid-growth pivot.

Read more: CNBC

Rules First, Friends Second

A Washington probe named Singapore as one of 16 economies accused of unfair trading practices, and Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong had a a pointed response for reporters by saying there will be no bending of the rules-based trade principles, even if sticking to them hurts in the short term. The Trade Ministry pushed back hard, reminding everyone that Singapore ran a $27 billion trade deficit with the US in 2024, in contradiction to American claims of a surplus of the same amount, as well as by pointing out that industrial space occupancy sits at a healthy 90 percent, not the slack capacity Washington suggested. While Gan said negotiations with the US are ongoing, the Prime Minister spent the week in Hong Kong wooing tycoons including Richard Li and Sino Group's Daryl Ng, to talk up collaboration on innovation.

Read more: South China Morning Post (HK meetings), Financial Times (UK digital deal), Business Times (deficit figures)

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Digital Trade's Open-Door Rulebook

Singapore and 65 other WTO members put the world's first global digital trade agreement into action on March 28, covering roughly 70% of world trade after negotiations started in 2017. The Agreement on Electronic Commerce creates baseline rules for cross-border digital transactions, including legal recognition of electronic documents as being as good as paper. Digital transactions now make up more than 60% of global GDP, according to the European Commission, and failing to put these rules into place could cost US$159 billion in yearly lost trade (WTO and OECD research). The UK and Singapore are also going ahead with a bilateral digital trade deal as the WTO stays deadlocked on more general reforms. The agreement is open to new members at any time, a diplomatic hedge for an architecture that still finds both India and the United States absent.

Read more: Straits Times

Lion's Vault

MAS wants Singapore to be the home of Asia's gold. The authority announced a gold system push on March 27, covering physical vaulting, OTC clearing, capital market products, and central bank storage services that would put the city-state on the same shelf as Dubai, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. The working group includes heavyweights DBS, JPMorgan, UBS, and the World Gold Council, among others. A day earlier, the LionGlobal Singapore Physical Gold ETF launched on SGX, offering fractional exposure in SGD and USD. Deputy Chairman Chee Hong Tat says the effort is "planting trees" in the wealth management sector, reminding everyone that setting roots will take time but will set the city up for a harvest as gold demand continues to rise.

Read more: Cryptonews

IPO Bait: Take Two

Temasek and MTI have tapped Fullerton Fund Management and 65 Equity Partners to manage a second S$1.5 billion Anchor Fund tranche to luring listings to the local bourse. Fullerton will play as cornerstone investor in public offerings, and 65 Equity Partners is expected to work with promising late-stage private companies on growth capital and IPO prep. There was a previous S$1.5 billion tranche that was launched in 2022 to solve the same problem, so I guess we know how well that went.

Read more: Business Times

CapitaLand's Data Centre Spree

CapitaLand Ascendas REIT dropped S$1.4 billion on three properties, headlined by its first Japan play, which is a 49% stake in a Tier III hyperscale data centre in Osaka for S$620.7 million. The REIT also picked up a cluster of logistics and industrial buildings at 25 Loyang Crescent and a 50% share in a business space on Science Park Drive. All three deals are expected to lift distribution per unit by about 2.1% on a pro forma basis. The Osaka move is indicative of an inclination to bet on AI-driven demand in existing digital hubs, diversifying beyond the REIT's current Singapore core.

Read more: Business Insider

Last Call for Tiger's Singapore Brewery

Asia Pacific Breweries Singapore is cutting 130 jobs over the next two years as it winds down large-scale brewing operations here by year-end 2027. The manufacturer of Tiger Beer currently employs 540. The retrenchment is part of parent company Heineken's global cuts of up to 6,000 roles, announced in February after the Dutch brewer's volumes dropped 2.8 percent last year. Tiger, born in Singapore in 1932, will very shortly no longer be brewed on the island that made it famous.

Read more: Business Times

Singapore Eyes the Atom

The National Environment Agency is expected to commission three studies on nuclear safety frameworks, global best practices, and environmental impacts as the conversation about whether reactor technology can break Singapores 90%+ dependence on imported natural gas. The work comes alongside ongoing Energy Market Authority evaluations of advanced nuclear tech, which started as part of the push to reach net zero by 2050. A 2012 pre-feasibility study came to the conclusion that reactors weren't suited for a small, densely populated island, but the government has kept the idea on the back burner as the technology’s continued to evolve.

Read more: Business Times (hydrogen strategy context), World Nuclear News (international partnerships)

Robot Buses Hit the Road

The first of six driverless buses came to Singapore shores earlier this month and will start carrying passengers on two routes from in second half of the year, running alongside regular buses in a planned three-year trial. The 16-seat vehicles, made by Chinese firms BYD and Zhidao Network Technology with software from MKX Technologies, include wheelchair space and “360-degree sensor coverage.” One route loops Marina Bay and Shenton Way; the other covers the one-north area around Buona Vista.

Read more: Business Times

Rice Media Sold After Running Out of Steam

Rice Media, an independent outlet known for long-form culture stories since 2016, has been acquired by social media agency Hustle Studios after laying off five staff late last year. Founder Mark Tan, a former lawyer, said he initially wanted to just shut the site down, but the sale will now let him settle debts and pay severance. He declined to reveal the price. The publication once pulled 500,000 monthly visitors and expanded to Thailand, but that audience never translated into a lasting business model.

Read more: Yahoo News SG

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Gas Lifeline Under Qatar's Rubble

Iranian missiles hit Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG facility on March 18, and the timeline to rebuild the thing is being pegged at three to five years. This is, of course, bad news for the world's largest gas export plant, which supplied roughly 43 percent of LNG imports last year. Natural gas generates 95 percent of Singaporean electricity, and Minister Tan See Leng said Friday the government hasn't tapped its months-long stockpile yet as it is keeping "dry powder" ready for when (he did not say “if”) things get worse. The immediate test is on the shoulders of GasCo, the centralized gas buyer that was set up in 2025 after the last energy crisis sent retail electricity providers running for the exits. Shell and QatarEnergy have already declared force majeure on Qatar-origin volumes, and with oil reaching as high as $119.50 a barrel, the cost pressures are mounting everywhere. PM Wong promised more support if the crisis escalates.

Read more: CNA (stockpile duration), Business Times (GasCo stress test), Business Times (conservation urgency), The Independent Singapore ($175 oil warning), Business Times (food price spillover)

Three Days, Three Outages, Zero Bars

Singtel's network collapsed for three days in a row starting on March 16, knocking 600,000 customers offline and freezing payments, ride-hailing, and food delivery. A mechanical fault at a network facility caused the initial eight-hour blackout; a software bug from a planned upgrade and a traffic jump during reconfigurations extended the misery through day three. IMDA opened an investigation and promised consequences. Note the gap between Singtel's promises that service was restored on the evening of March 16 and complaint from customers who were still unable to connect hours later.

Read more: Business Times

Changi Cashes In as Flyers Dodge the Middle East

Corporate travelers fleeing shuttered Gulf hubs have handed Changi a bonus. Australia-Europe flight bookings through the airport were up 38% in the first half of March. Flight Centre Travel Group tracked the shift between March 2 and 15, comparing volumes to the two weeks earlier. The rerouting follows the widening Middle East conflict that spread to Gulf states after the US-Israel strike on Iran, closing major transit points. FCM Travel Asia flagged the corporate rerouting as a pattern that’s likely to stick, but it also noted that most Europe-Australia connections already ran through Asian hubs rather than the Middle East. Hong Kong is reportedly getting similar overflow traffic.

Read more: Business Times

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Tokyo Chooses Its ASEAN Gateway

Prime Minister Lawrence Wong and Japanese PM Sanae Takauchi upgraded the label on their bilateral ties to a “strategic partnership” on Wednesday, during the anniversary of 60 years of diplomatic relations. They promised new or renewed cooperation on AI, quantum computing, semiconductors, and defense. The deal includes research on next-generation chips and AI governance, as well as a new ICT policy talk exchanges. Wong presented the upgrade as being two like-minded partners doubling down on free trade and rules-based order against a backdrop of "profound changes," and Takaichi talked up her government's 10th anniversary reboot of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific initiative. This is Japan's first strategic partnership in Southeast Asia.

Read more: Business Times (security cooperation emphasis), Business Times (cybersecurity labeling scheme), Business Times (historical company examples), Mofa Go (FOIP strategy connection)

Old Money, Safe Harbor

Hongkong Land, the property arm of Hong Kong's Jardine Matheson group, has paid SGD 541 million cash for a stake in Suntec REIT, buying into commercial real estate as geopolitical jitters push institutional capital toward anything that looks like a haven. The stake, picked up from Warburg Pincus-backed ESR Group, gives the group exposure to prime CBD assets including one-third stakes in Marina Bay Financial Centre and One Raffles Quay, properties it already partly owns through a separate fund. Investment volumes in local offices, hotels and retail were up 18% year-on-year to SGD 33.9 billion in 2025, the highest in eight years, as lower rates and safe-haven demand came together. Hongkong Land's CFO told The Business Times the group has recycled 90% of a $4 billion target and cut net debt by 30%, leaving plenty of room to put capital to work.

Read more: VnExpress

Sands Doubles Down on the Bay

Las Vegas Sands has given Woh Hup a multi-billion-dollar contract to build its US$8 billion Marina Bay resort, with 5,000 workers already on-site around the clock pushing for a 2030 finish. The 55-storey tower will feature 570 luxury suites, a 15,000-seat arena, and a(nother) casino next door to the existing Marina Bay Sands, which, in 2025, contributed S$2.64 billion in local business spending and an estimated 1.2 per cent of GDP.

Read more: Business Times

Banks Benched in 1MDB Endgame

The High Court told Standard Chartered and BSI Bank they have no standing to intervene in winding-up proceedings for four offshore companies tied to fugitive financier Jho Low. The companies are being liquidated in the British Virgin Islands as part of efforts to recover funds that were allegedly misappropriated from 1MDB, and want to wind up locally so liquidators can follow up on claims against the banks. At stake are US$150 million in transfers from one account to former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak, plus US$53.4 million and US$77 million that was routed to vendors for luxury purchases linked to his wife, Rosmah Mansor. The banks argued they should be allowed to participate as contingent creditors, but the court disagreed.

Read more: Business Times

Gatekeepers Who Opened Wide

The central bank has barred two relationship managers who helped clients launder money through a S$3 billion scandal that broke in 2023. Wang Qiming, formerly at Citibank, has been banned from the financial industry for 16 years after convictions on forgery, laundering and obstruction charges that earned him 24 months in prison. Liu Kai, ex-Julius Baer, got seven years out for using a forged tax document to help onboard a client who later went to jail. The 2023 bust netted 10 Fujian nationals with wealth from illegal Chinese gambling and lending operations, and turned up more than S$370 million spread across over a dozen banks. The scandal has caused compliance officers everywhere on the island headaches ever since.

Read more: Business Times

Wage Floor Hits the Kitchen

The three-year Progressive Wage Model schedule will push F&B operators to raise salaries for resident workers by up to 15 percent, and ripple effects are expected well beyond the legally required minimums. Boon Tong Kee's roughly 100 affected employees will see bumps that include overtime pay; Dian Xiao Er expects "substantial" costs to be incurred in all outlets. Even operators that have already been paying above the floor are worried because rising industry benchmarks are sure to reset expectations and put new pressure on margins. The response playbook is expected to the be old formula of higher menu prices, more automation in central kitchens, and some offshoring of back-office functions. Asme's president pointed out that firms that don’t need foreign manpower can technically pay below the new minimums, but that doesn’t really work when locals won't stick around for F&B careers and blue-collar job-hopping is rampant.

Read more: Business Times

Half These Jobs Didn't Exist

Nearly half of job openings in 2025 were newly created roles, hitting 49.3 percent as tech and professional services kept expanding. Information and communications were front of the pack with 74.2 percent of vacancies being brand-new positions, followed by professional services at 58.2 percent. The change is shows up in hiring patterns also, as roughly four-fifths of vacancies now do not use academic credentials as the primary filter. Employers want software developers, data scientists, and systems analysts who can work with AI tools, though they're finding it harder to fill specialized PMET roles. The share of those jobs that has been left vacant for at least six months is now up to 16 percent from 14.4 percent the year before. The ratio of openings to job seekers is steady at 1.58, a tightness that MOM's director for manpower research and statistics says is as much due to skills mismatch as it is a shortage of willing applicants.

Read more: Business Times (retrenchment rates), Business Times (skills mismatch data), VnExpress (remote work surge)

The Little Red Dot Looks Up

A new National Space Agency will get down to business on April 1 to oversee more than 30 satellites, come up with space legislation, and set Singapore up as a hub in a sector that should be worth $1.8 trillion globally by 2035. The government already runs a $210 million program backing companies like Zero-Error Systems, an NTU spin-off making radiation-hardened chips for more than 50 satellite makers worldwide. The workforce currently numbers about 2,000 people in 70 “space” firms, modest numbers that the agency is betting it can grow by leaning on existing aerospace, microelectronics, and engineering knowhow. Whether that's enough to matter alongside the US and China is another question, but few countries as small as Singapore have ever bothered to try.

Read more: Straits Times (structure), Straits Times (projections)

No Beans About It

Foodtech startup Prefer is building a pilot factory to produce bean-free (!?) coffee using fermented food waste, with 500 tonnes of (annual) capacity expected by Q3. Vietnamese robusta prices hit US$5,642 per tonne in the 2024/2025 marketing year, which is a crushing 143 percent increase from the previous term. Prefer's founders met at Entrepreneur First in 2022 and decided fermentation could recreate flavours that climate shocks keep making scarcer and pricier. We’ll see.

Read more: Business Times

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Three-Dollar Petrol and Nowhere to Hide

Pump prices crossed S$3.45 per litre on March 13, breaking records set during the Ukraine crisis four years ago, as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has cut off a quarter of seaborne oil. Caltex now charges 57 cents more than it did on February 28, the day the US and Israel struck Iran. Filling a standard 50-litre sedan tank now costs an extra S$28.50 before discounts. But petrol is just the opening act. Natural gas powers 95 per cent of domestic electricity, and LNG prices are climbing fast enough that Energy Minister Tan See Leng told households to brace for higher bills in the coming months. About half the gas supply arrives by pipeline from the region and sits outside the conflict zone, but the other half comes as LNG from a global market now scrambling to replace Middle Eastern cargoes.

Read more: Straits Times (supply security), Straits Times, Business Times, Business Times, Business Times (electricity warning, rebates)

MAS Dusts Off the Tightening Lever

The oil price jump behind those record pump prices is also forcing the Monetary Authority of Singapore's hand. Economists are betting MAS will steepen the S$NEER policy band slope at its April review, the first tightening move since October 2022. Several analysts now expect a 50 basis point adjustment, a reversal from the flat slope that’s wiheld for more than three years. The policy statement will drop on or before April 14. Oil-fuelled inflation is going to reset borrowing costs and capital flows across Southeast Asia, where central banks watch Singapore's monetary moves closely.

Read more: Business Times

0.87 Babies and a 'Radical Reset'

Singapore's fertility rate sank to 0.87 in 2025, down from 0.97 the year before, with resident births falling 11 percent to roughly 27,500, the lowest on record. Deputy PM Gan Kim Yong warned the citizen population could start shrinking by the early 2040s without action, calling family support a "top priority" and promising a government work group for a "radical societal reset." That likely means new policy on workplace flexibility, housing, and immigration, though couples interviewed said that time pressures and workplace culture are the real deal-breakers. One 31-year-old business consultant and his nurse wife decided one child is enough after realizing employers "do not benefit from giving their employees more time with their families."

Read more: Straits Times

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A Billion Buys Users, Not Builders

Singapore's S$1 billion AI push risks minting certified users when what the country really needs is builders, according to Leslie Teo, a senior director at AI Singapore. The problem will become more obvious as companies start to discover that junior employees are cheap but AI is cheaper, and start cutting early-career hiring accordingly. Fresh graduate employment fell to 74.4 per cent in 2025 from 79.4 per cent in 2024, and almost a quarter of job postings on (job site) Indeed now mention artificial intelligence, nearly double the 12 per cent seen a year ago. Teo argues the government will need to treat early-career training as a public good. The national SkillsFuture programme attracted 606,000 participants in 2025, but Teo says it moves too slowly for a field where "what you know today and what you know tomorrow can dramatically be opposite each other."

Read more: Business Times, Business Times (AI job postings)

Tokyo Ties Go Low-Carbon

Cross-border electricity, hydrogen, nuclear, LNG, offshore wind - that's the scope of an energy framework signed Sunday between Japan and Singapore. Japan is and Singapore's are both each-other’s fourth-largest source of FDI. The new deal will commit both countries to policy exchanges, business facilitation support, financial cooperation, and regulatory harmonization in seven low-carbon technologies. More than 5,300 Japanese companies already operate in Singapore, many as regional headquarters, and Singapore firms like Seatrium and Sembcorp are working on energy projects in Japan.

Read more: CNA

The Regulator That Other Regulators Copy

The Health Sciences Authority is now the first medical device watchdog in the world to hit WHO's top maturity rating, a designation that confirms its oversight system matches the standards needed to keep devices safe through post-market surveillance. The ML4 status is less valuable as a trophy than it is as a calling card. Malaysia's reliance programme has already fast-tracked at least 15 HSA-approved products since a pilot launched in September 2025. HSA is angling for full membership in the Medical Device Single Audit Program, a club run by regulators in the US, Canada, Japan, Australia and Brazil that lets manufacturers pass one audit instead of five. HSA plans to apply in the second half of 2026. About 200 medtech makers already operate in Singapore.

Read more: WHO Int (WHO ML4 announcement), Business Times, Business Times

1MDB Paper Trail Hits a Dead End

The Court of Appeal shut down foreign liquidators trying to sue Standard Chartered and BSI Bank over (allegedly) laundered 1MDB funds, deciding that cross-border insolvency laws can't be stretched back to cover transactions that predate the legislation. Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon said Parliament inserted the restriction precisely to prevent such retroactive claims, and said that the liquidators' workaround argument was "built on a false premise." The liquidators, representing two British Virgin Islands shell companies, wanted the banks to be liable for their role in moving misappropriated money through Singapore.

Read more: Business Times

SG Top of the Class, Again

NUS and NTU grabbed the top two spots in the first-ever Times Higher Education Southeast Asia university ranking. Seven Malaysian universities filled out most of the top 10. Universiti Teknologi Petronas led the Malaysian pack in third place, and Universiti Brunei Darussalam snuck into seventh as the only non-Singapore, non-Malaysia institution in the top tier. Thailand's Chulalongkorn University and Vietnam's UEH University landed in the top 15 but missed the top 10. Indonesia's top entry, the University of Indonesia, came in at 22nd. The ranking covers 195 institutions and uses the same methodology as THE's global tables.

Read more: Msn

Fake Times, Real Charges

Three former Singapore Underwater Federation coaches are looking at up to a decade in prison because they allegedly forging fin-swimming results to get athletes into the 2023 SEA Games (Cambodia). Police say the coaches faked times from a Malaysian competition that the women's relay team never even bothered to show up for, and then used those results to appeal for more slots. The bold gambit worked (at the time), as six athletes got sent to Cambodia, where they finished last.

Read more: Swimswam

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Hormuz Choke Fires Up Fuel Prices

High-sulfur fuel oil prices at the bunkering hub jumped more than 40% this week as the Iran war choked tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, stranding Middle Eastern supplies bound for Asia. The price of low-sulfur fuel oil has soared almost a third since the war began, with traders scrambling for cargoes before local inventories are drawn down. The Energy Market Authority says that electricity prices could go up if global gas prices stay high, a concern given Singapore’s 95% dependence on imported natural gas for power generation. About 42.5% of LNG imports in 2025 arrived from Qatar, shipped through the now-stalled strait. Gas prices have already risen by as much as half in European and Asian markets after QatarEnergy shut down production after drone attacks. "Everyone is struggling to find oil for the second half of March," one trader told Reuters. "Tankers are too expensive and arbitrage is closed."

Read more: CNA, Oilprice (fuel price spikes), Business Times (regulator price warnings), The Independent Singapore (youth job impacts), Business Times

Two Cities, One Gilded Prize

Hong Kong and Singapore are squaring off to become the world's foremost gold trading hub, with both cities courting the same Wall Street titans as precious metal prices continue to climb on geopolitical jitters. The central bank confirmed it's been working with major market players since last year to support more local gold trading, declining to deny reports that it's wooing JP Morgan and UBS. Hong Kong, which featured the push in last month's budget, thinks that it holds the stronger hand, however. Hong Kong’s direct access to mainland China's market gives it an edge that Singapore can't match. The MAS says it'll share details on its plans "in due course."

Read more: South China Morning Post

Scam Camps to Superyachts

Authorities have seized or frozen more than half a billion Singapore dollars in assets tied to Chen Zhi's Prince Holding Group, the transnational scam syndicate that ran forced-labor compounds in Cambodia before the US and UK nailed it with sanctions last October. The haul includes properties, luxury cars, watches, cash, and securities accounts, with vehicles registered to SRS Auto, a car-leasing firm whose owner, Tan Yew Kiat, also founded local fashion label bYSI. Tan was arrested in November on money laundering charges; two other Singaporeans followed, including the captain of Chen's superyacht Nonni II. A warrant has been issued for Karen Chen, 43, who allegedly instigated someone to falsify accounts and left the country before the October probe began. She's believed to be in Cambodia.

Read more: Business Times

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The Arbitrator Who Knew Too Much

A whistleblower has tipped off the UK's Bar Standards Board about a British KC who sat on a $490 million arbitration panel at the Singapore International Arbitration Centre, according to a report by Eureporter. The barrister was one of three arbitrators considering a claim by BVI-registered Kleros Capital Partners against India's Tata Power. Visa records unearthed by Russian journalists allegedly show the KC visited Moscow on trips sponsored by a friendship society chaired by Kleros' CEO, a link that SIAC's ethical code would have required the arbitrator to disclose. Tata is appealing at the Singapore International Commercial Court.

Read more: Eureporter

MHA to Meta: Don't Even Hate-Share It

The Ministry of Home Affairs hit Meta with five Disabling Directions under the Online Criminal Harms Act, forcing the platform to block posts showing a man putting his foot on the Quran aboard a public bus. Police are investigating under the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act. The ministry warned that even a reposting in condemnation of the video is a perpetuation of the offense, and is telling the public to report content to authorities rather than share it themselves.

Read more: CNA, Malaymail

Phantom Workers, Real Fines

The Manpower Ministry caught about 100 employers gaming foreign worker quotas through fake CPF contributions between 2024 and 2025. The schemes involved paying into accounts for locals who never showed up, artificially boosting hiring entitlements. Penalties will be up to S$20,000 for every fraudulent work pass application, AND a ban on future hiring of foreign workers. The ministry says it's using both complaints and surprise site checks to find the cheats.

Read more: Business Times

Greener Balance Sheets, Sharper Boards

MAS is reviewing its corporate governance rules to push boards harder on value creation and investor engagement. It is also publishing environmental risk management guidelines for banks, insurers and asset managers that will come into effect in September 2027. The governance review, run with SGX and the Corporate Governance Advisory Committee, wants boards to explain more clearly how they're creating shareholder value and to tighten up on corporate culture, board effectiveness and risk management. The climate rules, an expansion of guidance previously shared in 2020, now expect financial institutions to assess physical and transition risks, work with customers on their exposures, and keep up with measurement methods as they evolve.

Read more: Business Times (code changes), Business Times (environmental guidelines)

Point-Eight-Seven and Falling

Lee Kuan Yew gave up on the problem back in 2012, saying even a baby bonus worth two years of the average wage wouldn't move the needle. The fertility numbers have only gotten worse. The rate came down to a measly 0.87 last year, down from 0.97 in 2024. The numbers mean that 100 residents today are expected to produce just 44 children and 19 grandchildren if the trend holds. Deputy PM Gan Kim Yong says it’s an existential issue and warned the citizen population could start shrinking by the early 2040s. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the math gets uglier when you account of the fact that seniors will jump from about a fifth of the population now to almost a third by 2050; the working-age share is expected to start dropping in the mid-2030s. Not everyone's convinced the sky is falling, though. Veteran newspaper editor Han Fook Kwang, for example, is on record saying that a smaller population doesn't guarantee an economic catastrophe.

Read more: CNA, Straits Times

Silicon Valley Pass Gets an Upgrade

A new AI and Technology track under the One Pass visa will come into play in January 2027 to replace the three-year-old Tech.Pass scheme. The new visa comes with revised terms that have been designed to lure the world's top digital talent. Recognizing that elite AI engineers get paid in stock options as much as salary, the new track lets applicants meet the S$30,000 monthly income threshold through a mix of cash and equity compensation. Eligibility requires at least five years in senior leadership or specialized technical roles at sizable tech firms or venture capital shops. Manpower Minister Tan See Leng thinks it will be a way to attract what he called "movers and shakers, rainmakers and network brokers" who can spin off multiple enterprises. Having said that, however, the ministry is tempering expectations early by saying that it expects low application numbers, given the high bar.

Read more: Business Times (cabin crew expansion), Business Times

Property Giants Eat China Losses, Stay Anyway

Evergrande has been liquidated, once-solid Vanke is drowning in debt, and recent earnings from the city-state's biggest real estate firms show losses on their mainland holdings as the slump grinds through its sixth year since Beijing laid down the "three red lines" lending caps in 2020. Singapore was China's largest property buyer as of 2018, pouring in 34.65 billion yuan (just under US$5 billion) in that year alone. Beijing's recent policy support and market size mean most aren't pulling back entirely, but the game is shifting from a play of wide exposure to one of cherry-picking tier-one logistics and retail assets in cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen and steering clear of the residential glut that’s hamstrung domestic developers.

Read more: South China Morning Post

Six EV Fires

Six EV fires were recorded in 2025, and half of them were traced back to high-voltage battery failures, up from a single incident in 2024. The Civil Defence Force chalked the rest up to other electrical faults, including a dashboard component and the rear compactor of an electric waste truck. EVs are 7.4% of the national fleet; fully electric models accounted for 45% of new car registrations last year, the first time that EVs topped the list. Authorities are studying whether EVs and plug-in hybrids should carry different and distinct license plates so first responders know which burning car might electrocute them.

Read more: VnExpress

Diplomas in Hand, Offers Absent

Fresh graduates are finding 2025 a hard sell, with full-time placement dropping five points to below 75 percent as median pay has remained flat at S$4,500 monthly. The share of graduates that is hunting unsuccessfully is up to 8.5 percent, and more of them have taken on part-time gigs as outward-facing sectors like ICT have pulled back on hiring. Universities say the problem is cautious employers and slower churn post-pandemic.

Read more: Business Times

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Tehran Burns, Asia Braces

Israel and the United States together attacked Iran on February 28, triggering retaliatory strikes across the Middle East and causing ripple effects throughout Southeast Asia. Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong, speaking shortly after the strikes began at a Chinese New Year dinner, warned that energy prices are going to rise and the inevitable uncertainty will put a damper on trade and investment across the region. "You can see when the war will start," he told residents. "It is very hard to tell how the war will end." For a small, open economy that grew 5 percent last year on the back of stable global trade, the shocks of Middle East war and US protectionism are going to hit hard. The Immigration and Checkpoints Authority stepped up checks on arriving travelers, cargo, and conveyances at all land, air, and sea checkpoints the same day; they’re telling travelers to expect delays.

Read more: Straits Times, CNA (tariff rate increase), CNA (checkpoint security measures), AsiaOne (Supreme Court ruling)

One Baby Per Two Women

The total fertility rate hit a record low of 0.87 in 2025, down from 0.97 in 2024 and 1.24 a decade ago, Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong told parliament on Feb 26. Chinese births fell 15 percent year-on-year, partly a pullback after 2024's Dragon Year bump, but the trend has Gan calling it an "existential challenge." One in five citizens is at least 65 years old, (it was one in eight ten years ago), and without action the citizen count will start shrinking by the early 2040s. Singapore’s small size makes the country "exceptionally sensitive" to demographic shifts, Gan said, and over time there will simply be fewer women of childbearing age.

Read more: Business Times

Seoul Comes Calling Again

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung arrived yesterday for a three-day state visit, his second summit with PM Lawrence Wong in four months since the pair upgraded ties to a strategic partnership during Wong's trip to South Korea in November. Monday's agenda will be on AI, nuclear energy, and defense cooperation, with MoUs planned for trade, energy security, and tech. Lee will meet President Tharman Shanmugaratnam and attend AI Connect, a business forum for AI entrepreneurs from both countries. Korea is clearly betting on the city-state as its Southeast Asian anchor for next-generation industries; Wong made his first official trip to Seoul as prime minister just four months ago.

Read more: CNA, Straits Times, Korea Times, Yonhap, Chosun

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Chip Boom Lifts the Factory Floor

Factory output was up 16.6% y-o-y in January, ahead of the 12.1% consensus and the sharpest spike since November 2025. Electronics rose 44% for the month, more than doubling December's 19.6% gain. If you strip out the volatile biomedical cluster, industrial production was up almost a quarter over last year. Economists are now expecting full-year GDP growth at 3.6%, up from December's more restrained 2.3% forecast. The consensus view is that global AI infrastructure spending, with tech firms expected to lift CAPEX by 30%, will keep the momentum going through at least mid-year.

Read more: Business Times (January data), Business Times (MAS policy outlook)

Last Orders for Deliveroo

DoorDash is pulling the plug on Deliveroo after a decade, and service is coming to an end on March 4. The exit comes after what the parent company said was a "multi-month review" focused on markets with the clearest path to scale, though it insists the decision isn't about business performance. That framing sits awkwardly with Deliveroo's single-digit market share since late 2022. Deliveroo is also closing shop in Qatar, Japan and Uzbekistan as DoorDash narrows its geographic footprint. The pullout leaves Grab and foodpanda to split the local delivery market, a duopoly that bears watching even if prices aren't likely to move much in the short term.

Read more: Business Times

Banks Open the Taps

Local companies paid out a record $18.7 billion in dividends last year, up 19.1% from 2024, with banks driving most of the increase through special payouts. DBS and other lenders handed shareholders extra cash on top of their regular dividends, reflecting what Capital Group calls "strong trading and capital positions." The boost helped offset Singapore Airlines' dividend cut and pushed dividend growth well above the 6% global average. Core growth was just 2.1%, meaning most of the jump came from those one-time bank bonuses, but the headline number was still the highest payout since Capital Group started tracking in 2015.

Read more: Business Times

Zero Down, All Risk

Car dealers are hawking S$0 upfront financing on Instagram and Facebook, getting around loan-to-value limits through inflated invoices and unregulated in-house loans. Outstanding motor vehicle loans are now sitting at a 12-year high of S$12.4 billion. One dealer promised 100% guaranteed approval without any cash down. Neither MAS nor the dealers' association has indicated any appetite for a crackdown (yet). INSEAD's Ben Charoenwong is blunt about the invoice inflation scheme, saying "[It’s] not a creative financing structure. That's deception."

Read more: Business Times

DBS Turns the Screws on Fintech Rivals

DBS will jack up the fees it charges fintech firms for custodian services starting in April, hitting payment service providers with higher costs for the privilege of holding customer funds in virtual accounts. The Payments Services Act requires the biggest payment institutions to keep client money in segregated accounts, which means most fintech firms need a custodian bank whether they like it or not. The higher costs are coming just as local payment startups are finishing years of expensive regulatory compliance, so… not ideal, but could be worse.

Read more: Business Times

Uncle Sam's Eyes in the Sky

Four P-8A Poseidons are headed to Singapore after Washington cleared the sale in January, replacing a fleet of Fokker 50s that have been on patrol for more than three decades. The value of the deal was not disclosed. The Poseidons come with advanced radar, acoustic processing, electro-optical sensors and anti-submarine weaponry, in addition to the endurance to loiter over the Malacca Strait and South China Sea for extended periods. The aircraft will share standards and doctrine with the U.S., Australia and the UK, all of which already fly the platform. Singapore’s position at the choke point where the Malacca Strait meets the South China Sea makes persistent maritime surveillance less of a luxury and more of an existential need.

Read more: Indo-Pacific Defense Forum

Training Wheels Go Begging

Applications for the GRIT graduate traineeship program have dropped 90% since its October launch, with about half of the 800 slots still empty. Manpower Minister Tan See Leng is trying to portray the decline as good news, saying graduates are landing full-time jobs instead, though none of the first batch who started in December have converted to permanent roles yet.

Read more: Business Times

That's all for this week, thanks for reading. Your voice matters to us. Feel we're missing something? Have additional sources to suggest? Don't hold back - hit reply and tell us what you think.

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