Sherine Toh says her best days at work are when none of the 600-or-so staff at Singapore’s Tung Lok Restaurants quits, though such days are rare.
The Chinese restaurant group is one of the thousands of businesses struggling with a labor crunch caused by foreign worker curbs, that threaten the city-state’s already feeble growth rates.
“It has gotten much more tougher compared with the old days, five years back,” said Toh, who has at least 20 vacancies to fill at any one time as head of human resources. The group closed some outlets because of the shortage.
Photo: Reuters
The city’s restaurants, hotels and retailers have become the biggest casualties of the labor crunch since Singapore accelerated restrictions on foreign workers in 2011 as political disquiet about immigration grew. However, its highly educated locals largely shun the late hours and unglamorous work.
To address the constraints, Singapore is pushing businesses to look to non-human solutions for their human resource challenges, including greater use of automation and robotics.
At Chilli Padi Nonya Cafe near a leafy university enclave, a tray-wielding robot roams the eatery, offering to collect plates from patrons in a childlike voice. Navigating its way through customers, it delivers the dirty dishes to the kitchen.
While tech powerhouses such as Japan, the US and Germany invest billions in robotics to compete commercially in the emerging sector, Singapore’s robots push is driven by a much more urgent need: The survival of some labor-strapped small and medium-sized businesses might depend on them.
In the food and beverage industry, 90 percent of the businesses face the shortage and about a third are “really struggling,” according to its lobby group.
“There is an increasing number of businesses that are up for sale,” said Lim Rui Shan, executive director at the Restaurant Association of Singapore, which represents 2,200 outlets.
“Some of them just shut down,” she said.
To encourage adoption, Singapore this year announced plans to spend S$450 million (US$333 million) over three years to fund robot development and deployment.
Andrew Khaw, Infocomm Development Authority’s senior director of productivity growth through information and communications technology, admits the take-up of robots is slower than he would like.
However, he says the lack of workers is a new operating reality businesses now need to accept.
“It is a bit of ‘let us see who blinks first.’ As far as the government is concerned, we cannot go back on this policy,” Khaw said.
Service robots can be found in Singapore — in hospitals and restaurants, as waiters or cleaners — but are less ubiquitous than might be expected for the aggressively tech-oriented economy.
James Xia, director at Unitech Mechatronics, which built the busboy robot Chilli Padi uses, sees export potential in his product, but says development outlays mean commercialization is slow.
Xia thinks more upfront government grants, rather than the current post-project reimbursements, could accelerate development.
Another firm, Aitech Robotics and Automation, has developed a tea-lady robot that delivers food and drinks throughout a seven-story building to workers in their offices.
However, the company’s business development manager, Eric Lee, says orders are slow and does not expect to make any money on the showcase robot.
Weak capital expenditure amid the global economic slowdown has made it difficult for a virtuous robot development cycle to rev up in Singapore.
“In a hypothetical situation where there were no foreign [worker] curbs, then [domestic] growth might have been a little bit higher,” said Selena Ling, head of treasury research for OCBC.
For now, the labor shortage is just one of many economic challenges: Singapore this month cut its growth forecast for this year after revising down its second-quarter growth as the service sector contracted.
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has appointed Rose Castanares, executive vice president of TSMC Arizona, as president of the subsidiary, which is responsible for carrying out massive investments by the Taiwanese tech giant in the US state, the company said in a statement yesterday. Castanares will succeed Brian Harrison as president of the Arizona subsidiary on Oct. 1 after the incumbent president steps down from the position with a transfer to the Arizona CEO office to serve as an advisor to TSMC Arizona’s chairman, the statement said. According to TSMC, Harrison is scheduled to retire on Dec. 31. Castanares joined TSMC in
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the