30 Sep 2025
By Stuart Patrick, Chief Executive of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce.
It is hard not to return from a business trip to Singapore without being impressed by all it has achieved. In May, a report by Oxford Economics for the Hunter Foundation explained how in just 60 years Singapore had transformed itself from a country with a GDP per capita less than South Africa to one of the richest in the world.
This month I led the second annual Glasgow Chamber of Commerce trade mission to the island state. With 12 delegates representing mostly technology rich Scottish companies, and with support from both the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow, it was not difficult to attract customers and potential investors interested in our team. Our representative companies covered renewable energy, semi-conductors and AI, demonstrating that Glasgow City Region has its own sophisticated innovation economy.
During our visit the World Intellectual Property Office published its 2025 Global Innovation Index with Singapore sitting fifth, one place above the UK.
We had the opportunity to meet with Singapore’s Economic Development Board whose remit is to enhance the country’s appeal as a global hub for business investment. Over 6,000 UK companies have a presence there not least because of the stable legal environment, the relatively low tax rates and the excellent infrastructure that helps companies access the wider markets in South Asia and China. Singapore is a relatively low risk gateway into fast growing Asian economies.
What is striking is that despite Singapore already generating one of the world’s highest rates of economic output per head of population they are still determinatio to improve. It has, for example, the second largest trading port in the world beaten only by Shanghai, and yet, a new highly automated port is under construction which will increase capacity by over 50%.
The same is true for Changi Airport which currently handles 67 million passengers each year, one of the world’s top twenty largest, which is also being expanded. The aim is to increase passenger capacity by a further 50% and to grow the number of cities it connects with from 170 to over 200.
At the invitation of the British Chamber of Commerce Singapore, our local partner in delivering the trade mission, we attended an event exploring yet another fresh economic development initiative. In January, Singapore and Malaysia signed an agreement creating a Special Economic Zone linking Singapore with the Johor region in the southern tip of Malaysia. Singapore is a small island; its land mass is a little bit less than Mull. And yet it manages to generate roughly a fifth of its GDP from land hungry manufacturing. Combine Singapore’s attraction as a sophisticated and economically advanced regional business base with a ready supply of land and labour in Malaysia along with tax incentives and new rail connections across the Johor Strait and you have a radically different strategy for the two countries to grow together.
Singapore is not without strategic challenges. It is an expensive place to do business, and land is scarce meaning housing supply is a constant problem and finding labour is intensely competitive.
But these are mostly the problems of extraordinary success. More broadly we also heard from Alvin Tan, Minister of State for Trade and Industry and National Development, explaining the threat to a free trading island from US tariffs and a possible fracturing of the world’s rules-based trading system. Economic growth is being constrained.
What then are the lessons we learned from our trade mission?
Firstly, Singapore is a genuine business opportunity – perhaps not in itself given it has a small population of just over 6 million but certainly as the gateway into Asia. Singapore is an example worth understanding and in some cases emulating but it is also a good base from which to expand global operations.
Next, Scotland has a rich network of UK companies, government organisations and universities already working in Singapore. We found over 70 members of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce with existing activity, along with both the city’s research universities and the excellent team from Scottish Development International. We held successful events reaching out to the GlobalScot business network and the universities’ alumni. Crucially we could also rely on our own colleagues in the British Chamber of Commerce Singapore. There are over 75 overseas British Chambers of Commerce which offer a business-to-business network that complements the support provided by government.
It is to the credit of the Scottish Government that we could draw on support from their International Trading Programme signed with Scottish Chambers of Commerce and which helped us reduce the financial risk we run in organising trade missions. These can be complex and time-consuming projects, and the Scottish Government is offering support which is not readily available elsewhere in the UK.
That is important especially when one visit is rarely enough to build the trust relationships needed to be successful.
Equally, we are pleased to see the emergence of Brand Scotland from the Scotland Office as that offers help in making the most of the wider UK Government presence in Embassies and High Commissions.
Finally, we found more than enough evidence to support the conclusions in the Hunter Foundation report. Singapore’s sustained and consistent investment in their innovation economy, their education system and their infrastructure is both ambitious and deliverable. Economic growth is central to their thinking and economic development is a very high priority. We would do well to place a similarly high priority on building our own innovation economy.
In Glasgow City Region the importance of the work the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde have been doing in building Innovation Districts needs national endorsement and support. Initiatives such as the joint Scottish Government and UK Government ten-year Investment Zones are a good start. But the gains from these will be limited if we do not also fix the financial challenges our universities and colleges currently face.
Singapore is indeed a model from which to learn, and the Hunter Foundation report is a useful guide showing how that can be done.
This article was first published in The Herald on Tuesday 30 September 2025.
