Challenges push manufacturers to higher-value activities

Singapore

SINGAPORE'S manufacturers are grappling with an uneven recovery in external demand and falling global prices for certain goods on one hand, and domestic labour constraints on the other.

But the good news is that for two decades now, they have been moving away from resource-intensive activities towards high-margin capital-intensive ones, and Singapore's central bank expects that they will continue to do so, especially as trends such as cloud computing boost prospects for manufacturing-related services.