Speech by Minister Chan Chun Sing at the Launch Ceremony for ExxonMobil's Singapore Butyl and Resins Plants

1. A very good morning to all friends, family and fans of ExxonMobil. Congratulations to Karen McKee, on your promotion and new responsibilities. Congratulations to Gan Seow Kee and your team in Singapore for making this happen. Today is a very special day. In fact, this week has been a very special week in our partnership with ExxonMobil. Today we celebrate, as Seow Kee said, the completion of these two important plants. This week, we have also seen ExxonMobil partner Singapore to make another significant investment in the Singapore petrochemical industry.

2. Today, many of us take for granted a significant investment by partners like ExxonMobil and think that this is something that happens naturally. But if you think about it, if we cast our mind back a bit and take a different perspective, we will all appreciate how unnatural this event is, and how unnatural the series of events that have happened this week is.

3. In practically all the Southeast Asian countries, everywhere they dig, they find something spurting out from the ground. We are uniquely Singapore because we are the only country in Southeast Asia that has kept digging and digging and we have not found anything spurting out from the ground. So we have no natural feedstock as you would say in the industry lingo. We have no land. Neither do we have many people. So if you look at all these three factors – no natural feedstock, no land, no great bulk of human resources, all these are the preconditions for a petrochemical industry to not exist in Singapore. But today, we have one of the strongest petrochemical industries in this part of the world and if I may dare say, in the whole world.

4. So how did we manage to do this? For all the things that we do not have, we have to make them up with our imagination and gumption. We have to have the gumption to develop the supply chains upstream and downstream to make this industry work. We need to have the determination to see this through because these are not projects that will be delivered in one year or two. In a world of uncertainty where investors are looking for long term stability, we need to distinguish ourselves by providing investors with long-term stability beyond one or two terms of Government. In fact, the partnership with ExxonMobil is testimony to that. It is a 125-year long relationship and growing. We have to imagine what can be done. This very piece of land that we are on now, did not exist not too long ago. Philip Yeo went around the world and told people, there shall be an island, Jurong Island. Come and invest! And everyone looked at him sceptically. But today we look back with pride at what we have achieved.

5. And this is really the essence of the Singapore story. Naturally, we do not have many things. Naturally, we should not be where we are. But because we have the people with the gumption and the imagination, we can succeed. And we will make it happen for our partners like ExxonMobil and many others. If we do not have the land, we will find the land. If we do not have the skilled workforce, we will train the workforce. If we do not have the feedstock, we will make sure that we will have robustly built and resilient supply chains so that we can create an industry. So we have climbed many mountains together with partners like ExxonMobil. But we are not done yet. Going forward, in the next few decades, we will have a new mountain to climb. We see that as a new opportunity. The new mountain that we need to climb is what we call the low carbon world. The whole world has to respond to this need for us to control our carbon emission.

6. To many people, that is a constraint. It is a challenge to us. We are determined to work with you to produce new generations of products that are not only better but also more environmentally friendly. In fact, if any country is most conscious about this beyond the land and human resource constraint, it is Singapore. Singapore did not have the benefit of a large land mass or population for us to get a big quota in terms of the carbon emission under the Paris Agreement. But that is water under the bridge and we work within the constraints that we have and we are determined to grow our industries and overcome this new carbon constraint. I think we can do it so long as we have partners like ExxonMobil who are prepared to invest here, do the research and development, build new generations of technologies, to build better, cleaner, more sustainable products. So this is the new mountain that we will climb together.

7. And Singapore will make sure that we stay business friendly. Our economic agencies from the Economic Development Board (EDB) to JTC Corporation have our work cut out for us. Today the world is much more competitive for the next investment dollar. Our job is to make sure that we continue to provide that progressive environment, not just in terms of the kind of privileges, the kind of relationships we have, but also the kind of rules and connectivity that we can have to enable what we call data-enabled technologies. For us to have the regime to protect the intellectual property that you have painstakingly built up. For us to continue to secure our supply chains upstream and downstream so that the choice location of Singapore will continuously be strengthened. So that we no longer compete on the basis of price or size, but we compete on the basis of our connectivity, our intellectual property protections, our rules and regulations and our entire ecosystem. This is what we plan to do.

8. Today is also a testimony to how far ExxonMobil has come in bringing the workers along. Every time I come to ExxonMobil, I am always impressed by the efforts you have taken to train the workers and bring them along. This is no mean feat. In other countries, businesses make money but workers get left behind. And because workers get left behind, the society fragments and the broad middle starts to ask themselves, why should I continue to support this free trade movement, why should I continue to even adopt technologies? We are protecting workers by upgrading their skills to make sure that they keep pace with the demands necessary for tomorrow’s jobs. ExxonMobil is a good testimony to what can be done with a strong tripartite labour relationship. Where even when you progress rapidly through all the change that need to be, the unions, the workers, are part of the journey.

9. I know for many Americans in the audience who might not be familiar with our system, this might sound rather strange. That you have the unions on board as part of the transformation journey. But this is part of the unique Singapore story. The unions here are not part of the problem, they must be part of the solution. And yours truly used to be the union chief as well. And it was my job, working with Seow Kee, to make sure that the workers in ExxonMobil continued to progress in tandem with the company. We are proud to say that this relationship with the company continued to grow and we are not just complacent or satisfied with what we have achieved today.

10. In the past, the unions were about uplifting the rank and file workers as we called them, the lower-wage workers. But today, the labour movement has to work in concert with ExxonMobil management not just to take care of the rank and file workers, but also what we call the white collar workers, the engineers. In fact, in today’s world, the ones who are most likely to be disrupted are not necessarily the lower wage workers. The ones more likely to be disrupted, paradoxically, may be the middle rank workers, the white collar workers. And this is why over the years I have worked with Seow Kee closely to make sure that we continue to have the systems and structure in ExxonMobil to uplift the skill sets of all the workers in ExxonMobil.

11. We can have the best technology we can have the best investment, but without the strong, stable tripartite relationship, we will not have the ExxonMobil that we have today. So I have every confidence that even as we look forward to the next mountain to climb together in the low carbon world, we will be able to work closely with partners like ExxonMobil to continue to scale new heights and continue this unnatural story for Singapore to have one of the best and safest petrochemical industries in the world. And I am sure that as part of this story, we will continue to take care of all the workers across all ranks and file, across all domains, to make sure that we have that strong, stable progressive labour management relationship that allows us to make all this happen.

12. On that note, congratulations once again to Karen and your team, to Seow Kee and your team, for making this happen, for being a part of the Singapore story that we continue to defy the odds of nature, defy the odds of history, to excel beyond what other people can imagine. All that goes down to the gumption of our people to make it happen, and the imagination of our people to see what others may not yet be able to see. Thank you very much and all the best to your next venture together with us.