Pivoting for growth
Since I came on board last June, my leadership team and I have been working closely to transform Singtel Singapore to get us fighting fitter and more future-ready. For a start, we have consolidated our consumer and enterprise segments in Singapore into a single operating company and established a roadmap of our own – Prime 26 – to steer us towards long-term growth in a dynamic economy. This plan involves creating new growth engines, getting more efficient, streamlining our cost structures, enhancing customer experiences and transforming the culture of our organisation to achieve these ambitions. We are already seeing early signs of savings flowing through to the bottom-line, which will bear fruit in FY2025.
We continue to lead Singapore’s telecommunications landscape, pioneering many global firsts in network technologies that support the needs of consumers and enterprises.
Innovating with new technologies
With digitalisation sweeping the world, enterprises are seeking secure, reliable connectivity to support their businesses, especially in mission-critical applications. Backed by our strong engineering capabilities, we have been innovating in areas such as 5G network slicing, application programmable interfaces and AI, and developing new digital solutions to meet these demands. Singtel CUB is a great example of how we are integrating our network services to enable our customers to seamlessly orchestrate, manage and service their enterprise networks from a single, automated interface.
We are also continuing to expand our mobile capabilities beyond our borders through connected cars and IoT solutions which have grown our revenue by 41% year-onyear. This growth is enabled by our extensive roaming networks and advanced network technologies such as RedCap that significantly reduce the battery consumption and production cost of IoT devices. This has opened a universe of opportunities in the 5G IoT ecosystem from smart watches to industrial sensors.
For consumers, we trialled a 5G Concert Pass service at the recent Taylor Swift concert in Singapore. The pass provided concertgoers with priority access to Singtel’s 5G network, allowing them to enjoy stable, 1.5 times faster connectivity.
We also successfully trialled the world’s first app-based network slicing technology which enables app owners to activate a dedicated, customised slice of Singtel’s 5G network to boost the performance of their apps and enhance user experiences in situations involving high network congestion. This innovation creates opportunities for business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) partnerships to bring differentiated customer experiences to everyone..
We continue to explore further business-to-consumer and B2B2C applications of our 5G slicing capabilities for our customers.
Creating value for customers
Through our investments in generative AI and digitalisation across our networks and operations we are helping our customers, especially the small-medium enterprises to scale their business and expand their digital and analytics capabilities.
The increasing automation and digitalisation of our services has also helped over 100,000 enterprise customers seamlessly discover new products, make purchases, monitor business performance and manage their network.
For our consumers, we have been applying generative AI to augment the capabilities of our digital assistants so they can receive timely and personalised assistance. This, coupled with several other measures, has resulted in over 400,000 fewer calls, WhatsApp messages and emails to our contact centres – significantly freeing up capacity for our frontline staff to handle more complex customer issues.
To add value beyond our shores, we have also revamped our roaming offerings to include faster speeds, wider coverage and more rewards via our one-stop cross-border telco rewards programme which gives travellers access to unique local deals. Developed in partnership with leading regional telcos, these initiatives also help strengthen customer loyalty.
Boosting national resilience
New technological developments also bring growing threats that affect both consumers and businesses.
Beyond our efforts to protect customers from the network to device levels, we are helping consumers mitigate fraud and scams with our recently launched application, SingVerify – a seamless and secure authentication method through which a customer’s identity is validated in real time against phone numbers registered with service providers and Singtel. Authentication is conducted in the background, significantly reducing the opportunities for scammers to take over the two-factor authentication or multi-factor authentication process. We got M1 on board to better combat this problem nationwide.
Similarly, to boost the cyber resilience of businesses in Singapore, we launched the Cyber Elevate and Defence Against Cyber Scams programmes and are providing critical education and assistance, with the support of SkillsFuture Singapore.
In keeping with Singtel’s ongoing nation-building and future-proofing efforts, we are also developing Singapore’s nationwide quantum safe network and related security solutions to protect businesses from future quantum threats.
Prioritising people and sustainability
Our people are the bedrock of our sustainable growth. Our culture and change management approach is focused on fostering a sense of belonging, empowering our people to deliver meaningful, impactful work, and supporting career growth through mobility and training. Even as we reorganised our portfolio and moved offices, we managed to improve our employee engagement scores by 8% year-on-year to over 80%. This improvement puts us at 15% above Singapore’s top quartile of highly engaged companies and 8% above the global top quartile.
In line with our net-zero goals, we are making our operations more environmentally friendly, upgrading our infrastructure and leveraging technology to reduce our carbon footprint. Such improvements include maximising the deployment of solar photovoltaic panels across our facilities in Singapore and electrifying our vehicle fleet by 2028 to enable an annual reduction of scope 1 emissions by 450 tonnes. We have also introduced e-SIM cards, which will reduce our e-waste generation significantly.
We are ramping up our efforts in fostering digital inclusion within our community, through partnerships with the South West Community Development Council and Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore. Together, we have been running cyber awareness workshops for senior citizens so they too can enjoy a digital lifestyle safely. We have also been providing the migrant worker community with affordable prepaid mobile plans as well as teaching them how to remit funds securely via the Singtel hi!App.
For our various initiatives, we have received accolades such as the Cybersecurity Company of the Year from Frost & Sullivan and the World Communication Awards for our strong 5G network. But despite these achievements, there’s no room for complacency. Singtel Singapore will continue pushing the boundaries of technology to deliver greater value to our consumers and businesses.
