Singapore would seek to win its “fair share” of investments in semiconductor assembly and integrated circuit design, a top official said yesterday, amid a growing geopolitical divide between the US and China over trade and technology.
The city-state is to focus on the semiconductor value chain of activities, Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) Chairman Beh Swan Gin (馬宣仁) said in an interview with Bloomberg Television, as he discussed the fallout of the US’ Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act, aimed at wooing investments back to the US and stemming China’s economic influence.
The move by US President Joe Biden’s administration is a “muscular industrial policy to bring back manufacturing and technology development to the US,” Beh said. “It has definitely made competition for investments more intensive and certainly for the type of investments that today Singapore is also aiming for.”
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“We will have to take it as it is and we will do our best to secure our fair share,” he said, adding separately that Singapore accounts for about 5 percent of the global wafer fabs output.
Singapore last year attracted a record S$22.5 billion (US$16.88 billion) in fixed-asset investment commitments, nearly double the S$11.8 billion level the previous year, thanks to what Beh described as an “unprecedented semiconductor super-cycle.”
The EDB sees Singapore continuing to attract mature nodes and wafer fabs, in addition to design-related chips jobs that are growing steadily, although it might not repeat last year’s performance in terms of investments.
“We are a small country, so in a way the share of the pie that we need to ensure to continue to develop our economy is relatively small,” Beh said.
The IMF forecasts that the global economy would expand 2.9 percent this year, slower than the 3.4 percent pace of last year amid restrictive monetary policies crimping demand.
That is tempering Singapore’s expectations for investment flows, with fixed-asset investment commitments seen in a range of S$8 billion to S$10 billion in the medium to long-term.
Still, the EDB has touted Singapore’s evergreen attractiveness, thanks to its track record of “stability and trust.”
That reputation was reinforced by Singapore’s deft handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, it said.
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