Hyflux Improve efficiency and competitiveness
I visited China for the first time 30 years ago. It was a poor country. It was extremely backward. Singapore was twenty years ahead. We were a model of economic success for China and the rest of the world.

Three decades have passed. I marveled at the tremendous progress made by China. I see their achievements in manufacturing, innovation, technology, engineering, high speed rail, impressive buildings. 

I see their e-commerce and social media platforms - WeChat, Alibaba, Tencent, mobile payment platforms. 

They have really made big strides.

In many areas, they are far ahead of Singapore, maybe by ten years or more. 

They have come a long way, while Singapore has largely stagnated. We have become costly, inefficient and wasteful.

Our cost of living and cost of doing business has increased sharply. We lost our competitiveness.

Look at the call by PM Lee to introduce mobile payment two years ago. A lot of money has been spent but we did not get any progress.

Our online platforms continue to be cumbersome and badly designed. Instead of improving efficiency, we add to the burden for businesses. 

We made little progress with our Smart Nation project, in spite of spending large sums of money.

Our government has become incompetent and are not able to achieve a  priority goal set by the PM.

We create complicated systems in health care financing, in housing purchases, in CPF schemes that are confusing to all parties and costly to administer. 

We allow our NRIC, which should should be a public ID to improve our efficiency in business operations, to degenerate into a private ID system, leading to a loss of this strategic advantage.

We give a lot of emphasis on cyber security and even make life troublesome for our users - but we still suffer from massive data breaches, affecting the SingHealth, blood bank and HIV patients. 

Do we know how to focus on the right problems and addressed them effectively? Are we just blindly following ineffective protocols and practices?

During this time, we have seen the collapse of some of our business icons - NOL, Hyflux, Olam, Swiber and others. 

Many of our more successful listed companies have migrated to other exchanges. The poor performing companies remain in SGX. Even our investors have decided to move to the HK or American exchanges.

We also have our success - banks, property, REITS, Capitland. But they tend to be concentrated on banks and property. They are profitable on the back of rising property prices - but how long can these prices stay sky high?

We spend large sums of money in our infrastructure and computer systems - our MRT lines, our grand buildings, our impressive malls, underground tunnels, iconic tourism projects.

I wonder if we have carried out the cost benefit analysis in these spending and if they are economically feasible.

Our leaders are still not aware of these problems. Maybe they are, but they do not have the solution. So, they pretend that things are still fine.

Tan Kin Lian

Vote - do you agree that we have become inefficient and uncompetitive?

 

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