SINGAPORE – Singapore will be looking to win its “fair share” of investments in semiconductor assembly and integrated circuit design, a top official said, amid a growing geopolitical divide between the United States and China over trade and technology.

The country will be focusing on the semiconductor value chain of activities, Economic Development Board (EDB) chairman Beh Swan Gin said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Ms Haslinda Amin on Monday, as he discussed the fallout of the United States’ so-called Chips Act, which is aimed at wooing investments back to America and stemming China’s economic influence.

The move by President Joe Biden’s administration is a “muscular industrial policy to bring back manufacturing and technology development to the US”, Dr 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.”

“We will have to take it as it is and we will do our best to secure our fair share,” he said, noting separately that Singapore currently accounts for about 5 per cent of the global wafer fabrication output.

Singapore last year attracted a record $22.5 billion in fixed asset investment commitments, thanks to what Dr Beh described as an “unprecedented semiconductor super-cycle”.

The EDB sees the city-state continuing to attract mature nodes and wafer fabs, in addition to design-related chip jobs that are growing steadily, although it might not repeat the 2022 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,” said Dr Beh. BLOOMBERG