Name: How Manufacturing Is Powering Singapore's Economic Growth
Uploaded: 2026-02-14T18:07:21.000Z
Duration: 3 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

2025 was a pretty good year for the so called Little Red Dot, as Singapore is known.

Transition words & phrases

Despite trade uncertainties, the island's economy blew past expectations.

And one of the key drivers, manufacturing.

It's something not often associated with the city state, but

represents about 20% of GDP and proved resilient to the shock of U.S.

And we're not talking about spokes and widgets.

We're talking about sectors like biomedicals and advanced products from electronics clusters that are riding the wave of blistering demand from AI related semiconductors and servers.

The government's playing an active role in laying the groundwork for an advanced manufacturing ecosystem that seeks to attract top talent and investment.

First of all, we have been present in Singapore for more than 50 years.

So we, as I said, we feel at home here in Singapore, number one.

Number two, Thales has always been highly supported by the Singaporean authorities.

Because they do have a lot of appetite for technologies, including, I would say, new technologies in the manufacturing field.

Hence the fact that we are supported in this domain by Singapore to grow our footprint here.

In particular producing more banking cards or SIM cards with more automated industry, with robots, cobots and the likes.

Manufacturing is one of the key drivers that helped Singapore become one of the so called Asian tigers in the early 1980s.

But with a small domestic market and limited labor pool, the country had to pivot aggressively to find new sources of growth.

Its Manufacturing 2030 initiative, launched in 2021, aims to expand the sector's value added output by 50%.

But 2030, today, advanced manufacturing investments have poured in from major players across a wide range of sectors, including global pharmaceutical giants like AstraZeneca, Sanofi and Novartis, as well as leading technology firms like Micron, GE, Aerospace and GlobalFoundries.

Now the challenge is for Singapore to keep its competitive edge because even with its supercharged manufacturing sector, the government has warned that sustaining Singapore's economic momentum from 2025 is going to be challenging.

One is if Singapore doesn't have a fresh talent pipeline that they're either developing or bringing in from the outside, it's going to be difficult to keep up with a lot of these new kind of angles, right, that are linked directly to technology.

Number two, from a geopolitical perspective, Singapore is vulnerable when it comes to, for example, the critical technology stacks that drive all of these industries.

So you've, of course we start with rare earths and critical minerals, then we go on to chips themselves.

Then we're looking at networks and the Internet of things, right?

We're looking at software, we're looking at ultimately AI.

So for Singapore, the secret sauce is always going to be AI, which is at the end of this very critical, now increasingly bifurcated technology stack between the United States and China.

Still, the country could expect a global AI upcycle to be sustained into this year, which the Monetary Authority of Singapore says will likely provide near term support for Singapore's trade related sectors.