Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2663 actions· ✨ 89 recent

Singapore's National Research Foundation (NRF), under the Prime Minister's Office, launched the five-year Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2030 Plan on 5 December 2025, allocating S$37 billion (approximately 1% of GDP) for 2026-2030. The plan succeeds RIE2025 (S$25 billion) and introduces two named RIE Flagships and two RIE Grand Challenges; the first Flagship is in semiconductors and is explicitly aimed at making Singapore a strategically important R&D and manufacturing node in the global semiconductor supply chain. The budget envelope is split 24% foundational research, 20% innovation and enterprise, 17% infrastructure / new programmes ("white space"), 10% talent development.

Singapore issued a package of four companion instruments in 2025 to modernise its strategic-goods control architecture: (i) the Strategic Goods (Control) Order 2025 (SGCO 2025), which revokes and replaces SGCO 2024 (S 641/2024) and expands the Singapore Strategic Goods Control List to align with the 2024 Wassenaar Arrangement Munitions List and 2024 EU List of Dual-Use Items, effective 1 December 2025; (ii) the Strategic Goods (Control) (Brokering) (Amendment) Order 2025 (S 662/2025), published 1 October 2025, updating Singapore's extraterritorial brokering regime for controlled goods; (iii) Singapore Customs Circular 01/2025 of 8 April 2025, amending import/export declaration requirements to mandate disclosure of the final destination country of goods rather than the consignee address on the commercial invoice; and (iv) a 4 April 2025 joint MTI–Singapore Customs advisory explicitly warning Singapore-based businesses and intermediaries that their compliance obligations extend beyond Singapore's own controls — i.e., that Singapore authorities will not condone deliberate circumvention or violation of US, EU, or Japanese export controls by Singapore-domiciled intermediaries. This package constitutes the first Singapore export-control-architecture filing in the IPTM register and is directly framed by the February 2025 Singapore–NVIDIA–Inspur–DeepSeek GPU-diversion case in which three Singapore residents were charged for fraudulent re-export of restricted AI accelerators to PRC end-users.

Singapore enacted the Multinational Enterprise (Minimum Tax) Act 2024 (Act No. 36 of 2024), which received Presidential assent on 8 November 2024 after passing Parliament on 15 October 2024, implementing OECD/G20 GloBE Pillar Two rules for fiscal years beginning on or after 1 January 2025. The Act introduces a 15% Income Inclusion Rule (IIR) and a Qualified Domestic Minimum Top-up Tax (DTT / QDMTT) for MNE groups with consolidated annual revenue ≥ EUR 750 million; the Undertaxed Profits Rule (UTPR) is deliberately deferred to a subsequent amendment cycle. Singapore's adoption is structurally significant as the first major low-corporate-tax-rate Asia-Pacific financial hub to conform to the 15% floor, signalling that traditional 17%-rate holding-company and treasury-centre structures are no longer a stable tax-arbitrage substrate.

The Significant Investments Review Act 2024 (Act No. 1 of 2024) is Singapore's first horizontal, cross-sector statutory FDI screening regime. The Bill was passed by Parliament on 9 January 2024, assented to by the President on 6 February 2024 and gazetted on 14 February 2024; the Act commenced on 28 March 2024 under the SIRA 2024 (Commencement) Notification (S 228/2024), together with the Significant Investments Review Regulations 2024 (S 229/2024). The Act creates an "ownership-and-control" layer over a limited number of "designated entities" the Minister for Trade and Industry has identified as critical to Singapore's national-security interests, plus an "any entity" call-in power exercisable against firms that have acted against Singapore's national-security interests, regardless of whether they are designated. Acquisitions of ≥5% require post-closing notification within 7 days; acquisitions of ≥12% / ≥25% / ≥50% and cessations of ≥50% / ≥75% controller status require prior ministerial approval. Administered by the Office of Significant Investments Review (OSIR) within MTI. SIRA is the Singaporean structural peer of US CFIUS, EU Regulation 2019/452, the German AWG §§55-62, the French Décret 2014-479, the UK NSI Act 2021, the Netherlands Wet Vifo, and the Canada ICA national-security review.