SINGAPORE - Businesses must be willing to bear the transitional pains, be creative and resourceful, and seize opportunities where others see challenges, Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat told Parliament on Friday (Feb 28).
He said that Singapore must move fast to secure growth and jobs in the new economic landscape or face irrelevance as the global economy undergoes major changes, noting that the Republic's journey of economic transformation began four years ago when the Committee on the Future Economy was formed.
These efforts have boosted productivity and created more and better jobs for locals, he said.
In 2019, 51 per cent of full-time employed local workers earned a gross monthly income of at least $4,000, excluding employer CPF contributions.
This compares with 37 per cent of local workers who earned at least $4,000 in 2010, in today's dollars after adjusting for inflation.
Mr Heng, who is also Finance Minister, pointed out that Singapore is acting swiftly to secure its external economic space, to create new opportunities and room for manoeuvre in an increasingly fragmented economic order.
The country is also increasing the innovation, growth and transformation capacity of its enterprises and industries, he said.
He noted that building up strong local capabilities and ecosystems for innovation is critical to the country's economic success and resilience.
Singapore has expanded its research and development investments into new areas and technologies, enabling the country to transform its manufacturing and services sectors, as well as create new growth clusters in areas such as urban solutions and sustainability, and agri-food tech.
The Government is mobilising and partnering industries and companies to take ownership of their own economic transformation, Mr Heng added.
"Business leaders must have the mental agility and dynamism to experiment, and the resourcefulness to overcome constraints," he said, noting that these leaders will receive support from the Government from the Enterprise Leadership for Transformation (ELT) programme which was announced in Budget 2020.
Institutes of higher learning such as the Singapore Management University have also linked up with Enterprise Singapore (ESG) to support the ELT programme, and ESG will bring more partners on board the programme in the coming months, Mr Heng said.
He pointed out that partnership among businesses at an industry level is also important.
"Even as businesses compete with one another and seek to differentiate themselves, cooperation can help them do better, such as by forming alliances to capture opportunities overseas or collaborating to test-bed sector-wide solutions," he noted.
He cited the Singapore Poultry Hub - a joint venture between five poultry producers and processors - as another example of how collaboration between businesses reaped gains.
"By working together, these poultry producers were able to achieve the scale needed to transform a labour-intensive process," Mr Heng said.
The hub's smart factory will harness emerging technologies to increase productivity by 26 per cent and production capacity by 70 per cent.
Mr Heng said that the economic transformation efforts have begun to bear fruit. Besides more and better jobs being created, productivity has also grown in the last three years and Singapore's enterprises are entering new markets.
Singapore has continued to attract investment despite economic headwinds, with the Economic Development Board attracting $15.2 billion of investment commitments in 2019, and local employment has also grown in the last 10 years, he noted.
Said Mr Heng: "At its heart, economic transformation involves the courage to brave transitional pains as we change the way we do things.
"If we can all move forward with the can-do spirit of initiative and partnership that we have shown in the past weeks, I am confident that we will build strong firms that can grow and compete in the global arena, and create good jobs for all Singaporeans."
