Opening Remarks by Prime Minister and Minister for Finance Mr Lawrence Wong at SBF Singapore Budget Symposium’s Budget 2025 Conversation

Good morning everyone. It is very good to join all of you here for this post-Budget dialogue. You have been briefed about the Budget earlier.

Typically, in the Budget, especially in this year, where there are lots of expectations, everyone focuses on the goodies, angpaos and vouchers. Businesses say this – what about me?

In fact, if you look at all we have done in the Budget and across the ministries, we have paid very close attention to the needs of businesses because you are the backbone of our economy, and it is important that our businesses develop and grow in Singapore so that you can create good jobs and more opportunities for Singaporeans.

As Ping Soon (CEO of SBF) said just now, we try to address your multiple needs. In the medium term, I provided cost relief and corporate income tax rebate and even if you are not profitable, we have cash grants for companies. We are providing Progressive Wage Credits for you to co-fund the salary increases that you pay for your lower-wage workers. These are some examples that we provide relief in the near-term. 

Beyond these cost measures, we have also made major moves to strengthen our enterprise eco-system, and especially to support SMEs - the smaller companies.

For example, we are streamlining regulations. We have a SME Pro-Enterprise Office being set up and we are continuing to make a major effort to streamline rules and regulations.

We are making moves to fine tune the work permit scheme as you may have heard. We are making it easier for companies to retain skilled workers for longer and we are expanding the source countries, the non-traditional sources, so that businesses can again access workers from more countries or more occupations.

We are making adjustments to industrial land leases – the duration, as well as the renewal of leases. We have enhanced access to Government schemes because the perennial and constant feedback is that it is very complicated – do not know which agency to apply, so we have streamlined some of that in the business portal.

We have enhanced support for business transformation, IT transformation, as well as training. 

We are enhancing access to capital, including through Private Credit. These are just some of the things that we have announced, not just in the budget alone, but also in the announcements by the key ministries, especially MTI and MOM.

In fact, many of what we have rolled out this year were feedback, comments and suggestions that arose from our engagements with trade associations and the Singapore Business Federation, including not just dialogue sessions like this, but also the Alliances for Action, which we set up for business competitiveness.

I want to show all of you that these engagements are important for us. We do not just do it for pro forma reasons. We do it because we want to listen to you, we want to engage you, and we take your feedback, ideas, and suggestions seriously.

We cannot grant every single request. I think I heard Ping Soon (CEO of SBF) said more than half was accepted. Then you may say what about the remaining half that was not accepted? But it is not possible to grant every single budget request. It is not just a matter of resources and funding. Sometimes, it is also a question of whether or not we are able to implement the policy to begin with.

For example, many businesses will want us to relax foreign worker parameters and let in more work permit holders, but we are unable to do any of such relaxation, because any move will mean that easily, Singapore can be overwhelmed by too many workers and infrastructure, whatever we have, will not be able to accommodate and we have been through that kind of negative experiences before, and that is why we watch over the overall parameters and settings very closely. 

So, there are things we cannot do and if we can’t meet some of the requests, we explain our position. We hope you understand that, and we try to find other ways to address your concerns, maybe not directly, but there are other ways in which we can address your concerns. For example, on work permit holders - we can't relax the parameters, but we can do something about enabling you to retain your skilled workers longer. 

We can do something about expanding the NTS, non-traditional source countries. There are other ways in which we can indirectly or in different ways address concerns around cost and manpower even if we can't fully address the specific requests that were raised. But that is the approach we take. We will always listen to your feedback, suggestions, and we will work together to address whatever challenges we face together.

This partnership we have will be increasingly important as we enter our next phase, because you know that we are entering a world which will become more dangerous, more turbulent, more volatile. Every other day we read the news, we can see this happening and unfolding before our eyes. The US-China rivalry is continuing to intensify. America is taking measures to prevent China from overtaking it. China, for its part, says it is ready to respond. In fact, it says it is ready for tariff war, trade war or any type of war, and that it will fight to the very end. These are very aggressive words. Basically, the positions on both sides are hardening, and this growing conflict of growing rivalry, hopefully will not lead to conflict, but the growing rivalry and tensions will reshape our world, because the major powers increasingly will focus more on defence and security and less on win-win economic cooperation. It is every man for himself, or basically every country for themselves. 

So every country starts to worry more about their own defence and security and worry about vulnerabilities, interdependencies, and the major countries will be prepared more and more to use aggression and strength to get what they want, even if it is at the expense of other countries, especially the smaller ones. This is the world we are heading into, and there will be less regard for international norms, less regard for international rules.

It is going to be a profound change in the global order. It will mean the world will become more and more like a lawless jungle where might is right and we wish this was not so. The reality is, we can see these trends unfolding before our eyes, day by day, and I think it is heading in that direction for quite some time to come in the coming years.

All these will have a huge impact on Singapore, on our economy, on our businesses, on our people. We cannot change these global trends, but we can shape our response to these trends, and that is why it is important for us to continue to uphold our strong economic fundamentals – pro-business environment, stay open to investment, trade and talent. It is important for us to plan not just for the immediate, not just dealing with immediate concerns, but to think longer term, how we can ensure Singapore remains competitive, what we can do to navigate this difficult environment. That is why in the budget, we are making longer term moves, including our infrastructure as well as planning ahead of clean power, including citing the possibility of deploying advanced nuclear power in Singapore. 

But most importantly, we have to continue to strengthen our solidarity and unity and our partnership, our tripartite partnership, our Singaporean way of working together, government, unions, workers and businesses, forging solutions together. 

This partnership is going to be more important than before, and so I want to conclude my remarks by saying I appreciate and value the partnership we have with the business federation, with the TACs, with all of you, and I look forward to continuing this journey of all of you, walking together to navigate the challenges ahead, to build a better and stronger Singapore for the future. Thank you very much.