#FridayFive from the Executive Director: 3 May 2024

By David Kelly, Executive Director, British Chamber of Commerce Singapore


 

Who else has crammed five days into four with Labour Day on Wednesday?! Another cracking week – here is my FridayFive as we speed into the month of May.

1.      From Scotland to Singapore – we hosted the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce and a delegation of Scottish companies in Singapore. It was brilliant to see so much engagement, networking and opportunity. Huge thanks to BLOCK71 Singapore , ACE.SG (Action Community for Entrepreneurship) and the amazing Germaine Shalla and Faulyne Gagarin Tan from A*STAR FusionWorld by A*STAR - Agency for Science, Technology and Research for showing us the awesome start-up, tech and innovation scene in Singapore. Looking forward to seeing how delegation use this visit to support their businesses, and to support more visits where we can super-connect companies within our network. It was also a pleasure working with Scottish Development International. Safe onward journey to Stuart Patrick CBE, Richard Muir and Rick Minchom🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇸🇬

2.      Excellent XCL EducationLucy Haydon and I met with our partner XCL and had the pleasure of seeing their newly launched e-sports hub. A fantastic environment and use of technology. We also saw some of the learning labs and met Pepper the robot. Looking forward to building more engagement via our network. Thank you to Tammy Murphy and team for hosting us. 🏫 👩‍💻

3.      Built Environment Committee & Dulwich College (Singapore) – our built environment committee led by Chairs Alisdair Gillies MRICS and Andy Marr held their meeting at Dulwich’s The Greenhouse, a state-of-the-art learning lab which is a net zero energy building. It’s also the first international school building in Singapore to be certified Green Mark Platinum Zero Energy by the Building and Construction Authority of Singapore. 🌳 🏢

4       SOAS University of London – Vice President, Haslam Preeston and I met up with the team from SOAS University as we further develop our engagement with UK universities. The UK university alumni network in Singapore is a great community which the Chamber always enjoys engaging with and supporting. 🏛 👩‍🎓

5.      Digital Trade Pilots filming – we have been filming the output of our Trade Digitalisation Pilots initiative with Singapore Aero Engine Services Private Limited (SAESL)'s Simon Middlebrough, Emma Gibbons and Louise Beazor, in partnership with LogChain's Andrew McKeown CMILT and the UK Government. More to follow soon, but a huge thanks to AsiaWorks and Andrew Clark and his team for their on-going support in capturing our learnings as we support the digitalisation of supply chains. 🚢 📽

On top of that, I’ve seen our business sentiment survey results and these will be coming out soon, and today, the team and I are being pleasantly hosted by the brilliant team at Standard Chartered for our Strategy Day ahead of our AGM next week - more to follow soon. Thank you in particular to Eleanor Great and David Sharratt for hosting.