4 ms·

I think it is due to China. I remember Singapore was a large financial center for Asia, but China's rapid growth overshadowed Singapore. I also think Hong Kon

• ergocoder 9mo ago
  It's hilarious that we think of Singapore as competing with China where China has 1000x more people. Singapore is pretty impressive.
  • badc0ffee 9mo ago
    Well, 230x.
    • ergocoder 9mo ago
      well, ok, less impressive
  • woooooo 9mo ago
    Look at the map, all ocean travel between East Asia and India/Europe basically has to go past Singapore. They've been a trade and financial center with a substantial chinese population for a long time.
    • miyuru 9mo ago
      > Look at the map, all ocean travel between East Asia and India/Europe basically has to go past Singapore. Same can be said about Sri Lanka.
      • woooooo 9mo ago
        Its less funneled although most straight lines will approach the southern tip of India. Singapore is one of 2 possible ways through Indonesia and its the shorter one.
  • charlieyu1 9mo ago
    China could only compete with Hong Kong after they crippled Hong Kong hard enough.
• alephnerd 9mo ago
  SG's value-add was as a door into China (and India and ASEAN). China has strict capital controls so it makes FDI risky. During the 1990s when there were open questions about HK's status, a lot of the business community (and at least 10% of HKers) immigrated to SG to operate there. During the 2000s, the PRC made some good faith attempts at assuaging investor sentiment in HK, and that slowed the business and financial services outflow from HK to SG as HK had added linkages to Mainland China that SG would never have. Now that I can IPO or M&A in China and India with Singapore level valuations, I have no incentive to retain more than a minimal operational presence in Singapore in order to act as a capital funnel to the others.
  • re-thc 9mo ago
    And during the 2010s-2020s the flow from HK moved back to SG since China started their major changes in HK.
    • alephnerd 9mo ago
      I'd say it went 50-50 Mainland-Singapore. By 2019, if you were a Chinese company that only intends to operate within China, you had no reason not to move legal and leadership operations to Shanghai. On the other han, I'd you were a foreign investor, HK de facto become "yet another Chinese territory" which meant it's not a good hedge for an ExChina/China+One strategy which is executed in ASEAN or India, which made Singapore become somewhat attractive. Basically, the only loser was HK. That said, this is all business and financial services - no one was actually dedicating serious effort building sustained R&D capacity in either HK or SG when you can hire the people who you would have had to apply PRs (no one who is worth hiring would accept a work visa when they could work for an American company and L1/2 to America) for directly in China, India, and increasingly Vietnam.
      • re-thc 9mo ago
        > If you were a Chinese company that only intended to operate within China, you had no reason not to move legal and leadership operations to Shanghai. Where's the example where you're a Chinese company with most revenue in China (for now) but do sell elsewhere and anyhow, there are lots of reasons to not 100% stick to China, e.g. gaming companies have moved to Singapore in masses (at least some capacity) due to time and time of gaming crackdowns and censorship
• m0llusk 9mo ago
  Hong Kong has been in a different spot since 2023 when the Chinese government targeted some of the biggest due diligence companies and shut them down, substantially disrupting all contract driven commerce at that time. Avoiding random corruption driven crackdowns like that is one of the main reasons companies prefer alternatives like Singapore.
• maxglute 9mo ago
  SH onshore, HK offshore still. PRC bigger economy than entire region SG serves, if PRC wills HK to be finance hub larger than SG then that's what HK will be, on mainland volumes alone. One thing Singapore has over HK is it's land endowments though pathetic is slightly less meagre, SG managed to carve out nice industrial sector for 20-25% of GDP, something HK couldn't compete with PRC and IMO heavy reliance on finance fucked it over. Hence HK being integrated into greater pearl river after NSL slap down cowed all the nativists.