Commentary

It has been a year since Singapore took the landmark step of allowing legal finance for arbitration, bringing the country into line with the US, UK, Australia and numerous other leading centres of dispute resolution. Singapore took the prize for being the first Asian country to open up to legal finance. The Lion City is now in a highly competitive position to allow its users of arbitration to enjoy significantly lower legal costs to pursue meritorious cases, as well as improve their balance sheets and legal budgets. Following Singapore’s lead, countries and corporations across Asia are exploring how they too can enjoy the benefits of this innovative financial service.

With a high rate of mobile penetration and the proliferation of e-commerce sites in Singapore, more and more millennials are buying online. According to We Are Social, 59 percent of Singaporeans have made purchase online while 39 percent have purchased a product or service on their mobile devices in 2017.

Singapore’s mobile penetration hit a high of ~158% in the first quarter of 2014, but by the third quarter of 2017, it had fallen by 10% to reach ~148%. OCBC Investment Research in its 2017 telecom report predicts a “muted outlook as space gets crowded”. With penetration rates already this high, it appears that the Singapore app economy is nearing saturation.

Asia, the US and Europe, and in fact all global markets share the same trend towards: “Mobile Agility”. Mobile agility allows consumers access to information no matter where they are. Singapore is inherently unique in that the connectivity permeates across the island at both higher speeds and availability levels as it does in other places with more land mass. Either way, this technology makes it possible for consumers to go everywhere and do anything with the help of connected apps and IoT devices. From voice assistants like Alexa to Google to Connected Car Ecosystems, Mobile Agility technologies make every aspect of modern life easier.

In Singapore, with a changing workforce demographic comes a change in workplace preferences, attitudes and expectations.

Singapore’s hard-fought economic transformation is dependent on the ability of its enterprises and people, to learn, unlearn and relearn new capabilities and skillsets.

Singapore’s 2018 Budget includes a new Enterprise Development Grant (EDG) designed to help firms internationalise. This is welcome news, but with today’s growing climate of global protectionism and fragmentation, it will take more than grants and tax breaks to help firms navigate overseas expansion in this post-globalisation era.

Singapore’s e-commerce market is slowly positioning itself as a key player in the country’s retail industry. E-commerce is expected to make up 6.7 per cent of all retail sales in the city-state come 2025, triple that of the 2.1 per cent figure in 2015. The net worth of the e-commerce industry was estimated to reach more than US$5.4 billion (S$7.46 billion) in the next seven years, according to a 2017 financial report by Google and investment firm Temasek Holdings.

It seems as if queuing is almost part of the Singapore culture – it appears to be that we’re happy to queue for things we know will be worth the wait.

Traditionally, visibility and scrutiny of a company’s tax position was limited to a small number of interested parties who used disclosures in annual reports to garner what insight they could. In the last few years, that position has changed dramatically. The Panama and Paradise papers, along with numerous news headlines, have led to Boards taking a much closer interest in tax and its impact on reputational risk.

It was during one fine day in my trip at East Coast Park, when I decided to use a bike sharing app for the first time.

There is much talk about the Federal reserve rate hike. However what is the likely impact on Home loans as well as on Businesses?

45% of Singaporeans are unhappy at work JobStreet recently revealed in a survey.

To emerge as the world’s first crypto-hub, Singapore needs to find the middle ground between ‘crypto is a fraud/Ponzi scheme’ and ‘crypto is the best thing since sliced bread.’

Zero budget marketing took hold in Singapore in 2017 and will run rampant in 2018. Why? Because it works.

E-sports are capturing the attention of sports and gaming fans like never before. Worldwide, players are competing for cash prize pools topping US$24 million, and live e-sports competitions are now bringing in millions of unique online viewers and hundreds of thousands of live spectators. One of the biggest e-sports events of the year, the Intel Extreme Masters World Championship 2017 smashed previous records with 173,000 live audience members and 46 million watching online.