The State of Singapore Industry 2026

Manufacturing accounted for 18.5% of Singapore’s nominal GDP in 2025 (MTI), a weight that has barely eroded in a decade even as the economy has grown — a deliberate outcome of policy, not an accident of legacy. Real manufacturing value-added grew 8.7% over the year, up sharply from 3.8% in 2024, and the momentum ran into 2026: manufacturing expanded 12.2% year-on-year in Q2 2026, the single largest contributor to the economy’s 5.7% growth.

The forward indicators agree. Singapore’s manufacturing PMI (SIPMM) read 51.3 in June 2026 — a fifteenth-plus month of expansion — with the electronics sub-index higher still at 52.2. Non-oil domestic exports, long a proxy for factory health, turned sharply positive: electronic exports more than doubled year-on-year in mid-2026, led by integrated circuits, on AI-infrastructure demand and a low base.

The labour picture is the quiet structural story. Manufacturing employed 494,400 people as of December 2025, roughly 13% of the workforce (excluding migrant domestic workers) — a share most high-income economies abandoned decades ago. Singapore has chosen instead to move up the value curve inside the factory, trading assembly for wafers, packaging and process. The investment numbers back the choice: EDB secured S$14.2 billion in fixed-asset investment commitments in 2025 (up from S$13.5 billion in 2024), alongside S$8.9 billion of annual business expenditure and an expected 15,700 jobs over five years — the bulk of it in semiconductors and biomedical.

Derived figure, flagged: at 18.5% of a nominal GDP of roughly S$790 billion, manufacturing value-added is on the order of S$145 billion — an approximation from the share, not a separately published line; treat as indicative pending the SingStat GDP-by-industry table.

Electronics alone is now 43.2% of manufacturing value-added and 8.0% of GDP (MTI), and within it semiconductors have risen to 80% of the cluster — up from 46% in 2000. Singapore’s industrial fortunes and the global chip cycle are now, to a first approximation, the same thing.

Semiconductors & electronics — the engine. Singapore produces about 10% of the world’s chips and 20% of the world’s semiconductor equipment, and the sector is roughly 7% of GDP (EDB). The AI supercycle has triggered the largest wave of fab investment in the country’s history: Micron’s US$24 billion NAND fab (announced January 2026, output from 2028) and its ~US$7 billion HBM advanced-packaging plant (January 2025) — Singapore’s first — sit alongside UMC’s US$5 billion 22nm fab (opened 2025), Siltronic’s ~S$2.9 billion wafer plant, Soitec’s SOI expansion, and Applied Materials’ US$500 million toolmaking expansion at volume production in 2026. One counter-signal worth holding: the VSMC (Vanguard–NXP) ~US$7.8 billion fab is being rephased amid soft mature-node demand — a reminder that the boom is concentrated in leading-edge and AI memory, not across the board.

Precision engineering — the spine. More than 3,000 precision-engineering suppliers underpin the semiconductor and aerospace clusters — the machinists, toolmakers and coaters whose customers are far larger than they are. The cluster grew a modest 3.6% in 2025, lagging the chip surge it feeds, but semiconductor-related precision-engineering activity is the fastest-growing slice. This is the most filmable industrial base in Singapore — and the core of the Singapore Industry Index’s own record.

Transport engineering — aerospace and marine. The fastest-growing cluster of 2025 (+18.7%). In aerospace, Singapore performs about 10% of global MRO output with 130+ players across the 320-hectare Seletar Aerospace Park — Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney, ST Engineering, Thales — and committed S$750 million-plus across ten projects at the 2024 Airshow. In marine and offshore, Seatrium posted S$11.5 billion in FY2025 revenue, a near-doubled S$324 million net profit, and a S$17.8 billion order book weighted to FPSOs and offshore wind — the anchor of a yard base that remains a world leader in rig-building and floating-production conversion.

Energy & chemicals — the base in transition. Jurong Island hosts 100-plus energy and chemicals companies, more than S$60 billion of cumulative investment, and about 3% of GDP — but the cluster was flat in 2025 (+0.2%) and contracted in early 2026. The defining event was structural: Shell completed the sale of its Pulau Bukom refinery and Jurong Island petrochemical assets to CAPGC (a Chandra Asri–Glencore joint venture) on 1 April 2025, ending a presence that predated independence. ExxonMobil’s 592,000-barrel-a-day refinery remains, and the transition story is real — Neste’s 2.6-million-tonne renewables refinery (up to 1 million tonnes of sustainable aviation fuel) and a “Sustainable Jurong Island” plan targeting 2-million-tonnes-a-year carbon capture by 2030.

Biomedical & medtech — high value, high volatility. Biopharmaceutical plants — 60-plus, including eight of the world’s ten largest drugmakers — produced S$12.1 billion in 2024 (against more than S$18 billion in 2023: output swings hard by product cycle, so read it by the year, not the trend). MedTech output reached S$19.4 billion in 2023, nearly quadruple its 2013 level. The 2024 investment slate was heavy: AstraZeneca (US$1.5 billion) for its first end-to-end ADC facility, Pfizer (US$743 million), Sanofi (~US$590 million), Novartis (US$256 million) and AbbVie (US$223 million).

Construction & built environment — a decade high. BCA put 2025 construction demand at a preliminary S$50.5 billion, close to a ten-year high, and projects S$47–53 billion for 2026, carried by Changi Terminal 5 (ground broken May 2025, ~50 million passengers in phase one), the Marina Bay Sands expansion, healthcare and rail.

Logistics & supply chain — the automated port. PSA Singapore handled a record 40-million-plus TEU in 2024. Tuas Port — the world’s largest fully-automated terminal — passed 10 million TEU cumulatively by February 2025 across 11 operational berths, on the way to a 65-million-TEU ultimate capacity in the 2040s. Changi handled 1.99 million tonnes of airfreight in 2024.

Data centre & digital infrastructure — the constraint lifting. Singapore hosts 70-plus data centres and about 1.4 GW of capacity. After a 2019 moratorium, the Green Data Centre Roadmap (May 2024) unlocked at least 300 MW more, and a fresh 200 MW allocation round (DC-CFA2) opened in March 2026 — capacity now gated on efficiency and green power rather than frozen. AWS has committed US$9 billion to Singapore cloud and data-centre infrastructure (a multi-year regional figure).

Food manufacturing & agritech — the reset. Food manufacturing turned over S$11.2 billion in 2023 across 1,500-plus companies. The headline 2025 development is a policy reversal: on 4 November 2025 Singapore replaced the “30 by 30” self-sufficiency goal — long a fixture — with softer 2035 targets of 20% of fibre and 30% of protein produced locally, an admission that vertical farming and alternative protein have struggled against energy costs and consumer uptake.

Industrial automation & robotics; clean energy & environmental. These cut across the clusters above rather than reporting as separate national lines — automation as the productivity layer inside every factory, clean-energy and environmental engineering as the build-out beneath the Sustainable Jurong Island and green-data-centre agendas. The Index tracks them as capability spines; national statistics fold them into the six clusters.

One: the memory supercycle is remaking the industrial base. Back-to-back Micron commitments — US$7 billion in 2025, US$24 billion in 2026 — plus UMC, Siltronic, Soitec and Applied Materials have concentrated a decade of fab investment into eighteen months. It is real and it is narrow: leading-edge and AI memory are booming while mature-node capacity (VSMC) is being rephased. Singapore’s industrial growth is now, more than at any point in its history, a bet on one cycle.

Two: petrochemicals are giving way to chips and pharma. Shell’s April 2025 exit is the clearest marker of a base rotating from oil toward semiconductors and biologics. The chemicals cluster’s flatness and the electronics cluster’s surge are the same story seen from two ends.

Three: the value moved up, not out. Singapore kept manufacturing at nearly a fifth of GDP by abandoning volume assembly for wafers, advanced packaging, high-value pharma and precision components — a workforce of under 500,000 producing far more than its headcount implies. Underneath sits the supplier spine: 3,000-plus precision firms whose output is booked to customers larger than themselves.

Four: the constraints are being renegotiated, not removed. Data-centre capacity, food self-sufficiency, and Jurong Island’s carbon footprint were all hard limits a few years ago; each has been re-set in 2024–2025 toward “grow, but efficiently.” The direction is managed expansion under tighter environmental terms.