Cartel Kingpin Indicted, AI Race Heats Up
A container cartel boss faces charges, Singapore overtakes Jakarta in market cap, OpenAI sets up shop here, and a telco deal collapses spectacularly.
Singapore business, finance and trade news, every Monday.
"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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