A progressive portal to the Asia-Pacific market: Why global companies are expanding to Singapore

Nick Nash, managing partner and co-founder of venture capital firm Asia Partners, keeps a close watch on business in Southeast Asia, and he’s seeing some noteworthy trends. Multinational companies doing business in the region are flourishing. And some of the biggest success stories, he said, have something rather interesting in common: They’re opting to expand their operations to Singapore. 

Tech giants are using Singapore as a key node in the region, but the trend isn’t confined to sector or scale. From startups to multinational enterprises, from fintech to agri-food, foreign companies are setting up outposts in the island city-state. According to Nash there are “all sorts of good reasons” for this, from access to one of the world’s most impressive talent pools to establishing a foothold in the Asia-Pacific market’s gateway city to game-changing governmental support.

A wealth of talent

Year after year, Singapore is pegged as one of the top locations worldwide for ease of doing business, economic competitiveness, human capital, global connectivity and more. But how do these rankings stand up to the modern realities of an unpredictable world of work?

For Sprinklr, a digital marketing and advertising platform, the need for new research and development (R&D) facilities and new relationships with Asian enterprise clients pushed them to consider a number of locations for an APAC base.

Sprinklr Senior Vice President Arun Singh had previously worked with another tech company with offices in Singapore, and as leadership weighed the options, Singh knew Singapore’s benefits firsthand.

Before Sprinklr made the leap, they had a conversation with the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), which helps companies establish regional headquarters, relocate offices or launch new businesses in Singapore. With the EDB’s guidance, Singh said, they’ve found a culture of innovation, high performance and investment in upskilling and talent development.

This wasn’t a matter of luck: According to the Singapore EDB, the Singapore government spent more than $1 billion SGD (approximately $700 million USD) per year on continued education and training from 2015 to 2020, and that investment shows: More than half of Singaporean workers are employed in high-skilled roles.

Further enriching talent options, Singapore recently upgraded its work visa program, instituting a new pass for top foreign talent across all sectors and a longer, five-year employment pass for talent with in-demand tech skill sets.

Appealing to multinational companies like Sprinklr, Singapore’s focus on talent has resulted in a skilled talent pool which is also multicultural and multilingual, allowing companies across industries to localize their offerings for a competitive edge.

A portal to the Asia-Pacific market

Sprinklr’s Singapore arm launched in 2021 and, with local customer success talent that speak the native language and understand the culture, this move has already positioned them to better serve their key enterprise customers that also have operations in Singapore.

But the team is focused on more than just local talent and local client relationships. The Singapore location was a smart move for developing new relationships in the Asia Pacific region as Singapore is the gateway to the APAC region, Singh noted. Additionally, the island has a growing concentration of up-and-coming regional and Fortune 500 companies, opening the door to a diversity of opportunities.

For companies across industries, opening up shop in Singapore means access to all of Asia—not just linguistically and culturally, but, for companies dealing in physical goods, this is also the case in terms of trade and export: Singapore has been named the second-most connected country in the world. A global shipping and logistics hub, Singapore’s port handles the most container shipping on the planet, its activity fueled by an extensive network of free trade and digital economy agreements.

Sprinklr’s initial pilot phase was just a bit over a dozen personnel, Singh said, “but we see a lot of opportunity here.” He anticipates Sprinklr’s Singapore contingent could grow by a factor of 10 in the coming years.
 

A progressive, innovation-friendly regulatory approach

Beyond talent, Singh said Sprinklr’s new R&D outpost benefits from the ease of doing business in Singapore. He described just the right amount of bureaucracy, operating with deep consideration of business’s needs “end to end,” at high efficiency.

Carrie Chan, CEO of Hong Kong food innovation startup Avant Meats, has had a similar experience in a completely different venture.

The Avant Meats team connected with Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) when the startup was looking outside of Hong Kong for a more innovation-friendly place to undertake their second phase of development: the bioprocessing procedure around a unique new cell culture technology that can produce marine protein without the raising, catching or slaughtering of fish.

“[A] government can over-regulate, being too stringent, and it will kill innovation,” Chan said. “But they could also under-regulate, which is too loose, and then any product gets into the market.” In the agri-food business, under-regulation comes with risks to the public. Avant Meats sought just the right balance, considering international locations across Asia, Europe and the United States.

Singapore was a lead candidate in terms of accessibility and ease of doing business, with transparent, streamlined and fully digitized company registration processes, high efficiency, clear laws and favorable tax structures. Above all, though, Chan and her colleagues were taken by the thoughtful interplay between food policy and business regulation. Singapore is the first country in the world with legislation to allow for the sale of cultivated meat, Chan said, allowing the government to foster innovation while safeguarding public health.

A*STAR proposed a research partnership with Avant Meats, and within a year, Avant Meats had not only established a Singapore office—the springboard for their process development efforts, their pilot production line and a quickly growing Singapore-based team—but also launched a joint research lab with A*STAR’s Bioprocessing Technology Institute. Together, they are developing groundbreaking cellular solutions that will lower the production cost of healthy, sustainable cultivated fish.

Chan expects that the ability to work closely with the government on their new facilities, from build-out to inspection will accelerate their time to market, and to profitability. 

The Avant Meats story isn’t an outlier in Singapore. The island’s openness to innovation is fusing with Southeast Asia’s consumption preferences and a growing demand for protein alternatives, making the island nation a hospitable incubator for the burgeoning global agri-food economy.

A future of growth

Surveilling the broader region’s investment opportunities, Nash’s firm is bullish about growth-stage companies in Singapore. A Singapore regional headquarters signals an interest in multi-national growth, he said, and it means the company will have significant support at its disposal in that quest, from a partnership with the Singapore EDB to access to a wealth of infrastructure and resources, including the port mega-expansion and a 2020 government commitment to invest more than $3 billion SGD (approximately $2.1 billion USD) in Singapore’s manufacturing infrastructure.

The government investment in success, ease of doing business and high quality of life all contribute to the flourishing business landscape, but ultimately, in Nash’s view, Singapore's success hinges on the nation’s commitments to fairness, lack of corruption and education.

“There's nothing that stops an educated population that operates with a fair referee, nothing,” he said. “And the results here are breathtaking.”

Learn more about the benefits of expanding your business to Singapore here. 

This article was created and originally published by WP Creative Group.