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Singapore’s manufacturing sector made up 27 percent of GDP in 2005. Then, like most advanced countries, the number began to slip, accounting for just 18 percent by 2013.
Singapore gradually became a service economy known as a financial center.
But last year, factory output was worth 22 percent of Singapore’s GDP, making it one of the few post-industrial nations to return to manufacturing at strength.
Yet, during manufacturing’s return, Singapore’s proportion of factory workers steadily dropped, falling from 15.5 percent of the workforce in 2015 to 12.3 last year.
Singapore courted robots, not workers.
German vaccine maker BioNTech is building a new facility here that will make hundreds of millions of vaccine doses a year with a staff of no more than 80, including office workers.
Dyson has deployed more than 300 robots in its Singapore plant assembling vacuum cleaner motors, with only a handful of humans to watch over them.
General Motors sends damaged jet engine blades here to be repaired using automated 3D printers. GlobalFoundries, the chip maker, can move its semiconductors through 350 fabrication steps in its Singapore factory with humans involved in only a few.
Hyundai’s new electric-car plant in Singapore will use humans “only when necessary,” the company said.
All this in an island nation barely bigger than the U.S. city of Chicago.
The country’s 5.5 million people have long relied on imported labor to do manual work, so wooing companies to bring state-of-the-art automation here engendered no political unrest.
And Singapore wooed with verve, offering tax breaks, R&D partnerships, and subsidies for worker training, among other goodies.
Singapore also is centrally located in Asia, making shipping quicker and cheaper to and from key ports, and prides itself on its strong intellectual property protections.
“Modern factories require much less land and labor” than in the past, prime minister Heng Swee Keat said in a speech last year. “This has made manufacturing that was [previously] unthinkable in Singapore possible again.”
While the number of factory workers has declined overall, the proportion of manufacturing employees rated as highly skilled has grown 8 percent in the past 12 months to comprise 74 percent of factory workers.
TRENDPOST: In much of the West, factory work still carries a stigma: you get a factory job if you can’t qualify for something better.
However, in Singapore, China, and other Asian nations, factory work has become a high-tech, high-skill, white-collar career that carries respect.
Western nations now rethinking globalization as part of our Top 2022 Trend toward Self-Sufficient Economies can look to Singapore as a model.
Investments in R&D and other financial incentives will sow the seeds. Changing the culture around factory work will fertilize a new economic harvest.