1. We surrendered a sovereign capability — at the worst possible moment
- Singapore is a maritime nation in the fullest sense — the world's busiest container transhipment port, the world's largest bunkering hub, and by one global ranking the leading maritime city on the planet.[1] The sea is not one sector among many for us; it is the foundation we were built on. We are an island that imports more than nine in ten of our calories across the water, and we sit astride the Strait of Malacca, through which roughly a quarter of all seaborne trade and nearly half the world's seaborne crude oil moves. A nation this dependent on the sea cannot safely treat the capability to move on it as a commodity to be rented. Yet over two decades we quietly gave away one of its core sovereign capabilities — a shipping line of our own. Neptune Orient Lines (NOL), the national carrier, was sold to France's CMA CGM in 2016, the last act in a long dismantling: the tanker fleet to Malaysia in 2003, the headquarters in 2012, the logistics arm in 2015, then the line itself.[2][3] In so doing, we exited an entire strategic domain.
- We did this right as every serious maritime nation moved the other way. France is putting ten of the world's largest ships under its flag as a "strategic fleet" —requisition able in a crisis, crewed by its own officers — using CMA CGM, the very company that bought our line.[4] Korea, after Hanjin collapsed the same year we sold NOL, poured state billions into rebuilding HMM into a top-ten carrier through a dedicated sovereign vehicle.[5] China built COSCO into an arm of national power.[6]Even Australia, down to a dozen trading ships, is legislating a national strategic fleet.[7] These are not nostalgists. They are states that understand shipping is a strategic capability, not a commodity service to be rented.
- And our own Government knows this — in the air! "For Changi to work well and succeed," it told this House, "you must first have an anchor national carrier, SIA"; when SIA neared collapse, Temasek put in up to fifteen billion dollars to keep it alive.[8] SIA and NOL were both Temasek operators. We treat the airline, SIA, as strategic and rescue it; but we treat the sea carrier, NOL, as a commodity and sell it. Temasek has since bought into a different carrier — Pacific International Lines(PIL) — but we hold it for a return, not for a purpose; so Singapore stands as a major maritime hub with no national line of its own.
- It sold NOL on the argument that container shipping is fungible — the box does not care whose ship it rides in. It does not defend SIA on those grounds at all. It keeps the airline because a national carrier is a strategic asset in its own right: a capability the country controls, the people it trains, and the option to direct it in a crisis. The Government has not stopped believing a national carrier is strategic — it has only stopped believing it for the sea.
2. What a national line actually is — the full strategic value
- The case for selling NOL rested on a category error: that a shipping line is just freight, and freight is fungible. It is not. A national line is two strategic capabilities bound together.
- First, it is the academy that makes our maritime people. There is a ladder that runs from the deck of a ship to the command of a port, and every rung is built on the one below. It begins at sea: a cadet stands his watches and qualifies as an officer of the watch, then as chief mate, and — a decade or more on — as master; the engine room climbs the same way to chief engineer. None of it can be done in a classroom or bought with a grant, because each certificate is the legal product of documented sea time on a working ship.[9] That sea time is then the entry ticket for the shore roles that keep a great port's waters safe: the harbour pilot who boards and berths the largest ships afloat, and the surveyors who inspect them, must by the rules hold those certificates, and above them sits the Port Master — the statutory officer who can order any vessel in our waters to move, stop or stay. Singapore's Port Masters have been a line of master mariners: Captain M Segar, who came up as a cadet, then a harbour pilot, then Port Master, and rose to Assistant Chief Executive of the MPA; and Captain Lee Cheng Wee, the harbour pilot of the early 1970s whom the Government held up in this year's Budget debate as the example for the next generation.[10] No one is made a master mariner by a scholarship.
- Marine command[11] is the one part of the port that still requires a master's ticket, and we are failing. Fewer than one in twelve officers on our own flag is Singaporean; our cadets must seek their sea time on foreign ships, and may face a lack of access.[12] Britain watched its officer corps age and shrink as its fleet flagged out, then had to pay shipowners through the tax code to train cadets again; Australia, down from a hundred trading ships to about a dozen, is now legislating a strategic fleet to rebuild the skills it lost.[13] Ships can be bought or chartered within a year; a generation of sea-experienced Singaporeans takes a generation to grow. When Temasek sold NOL it crystallised a financial gain, a one-time figure on a balance sheet, and sold the training ground the whole ladder stands on. Cut the fleet away at the foot of the ladder and, a decade and more on, the top of it empties. We have been in search of lost time ever since, in the long run, the seafaring core of our own port — our harbour pilots and the marine command above them — cannot be kept Singaporean; it must be staffed, like our flag already is, by other nations' officers.
- Second, it is directable capacity — the difference between sovereignty and dependence in a crisis. Container space is rationed whenever effective capacity is squeezed faster than it can be replaced: a demand surge like the pandemic, when rates rose sevenfold; or a risk-driven diversion like the Red Sea, where rerouting every ship around Africa swallowed a tenth of the world's capacity at a stroke.[14]In such a crunch the market does not serve all comers equally — the carriers still sailing gave priority to exporters under their own flag, Korea ordered HMM to ring-fence space for Korean firms, and a nation relying on foreign lines is served last, at whatever price is named. A country that owns no capacity in a capacity crunch is a beggar for allocation, and will be served with all others.
3. The Government's defence does not survive scrutiny
- I put this to the Government in April. Its answer was that our supply lines are secured by diversification, our standing as a trusted hub, and "a wide network of global shipping lines."[15] I respectfully disagree, and think it conflates the port and the carrier.
- It turns on an ambiguity in the word "node." When we call ourselves a node, we mean leverage —some power to bend the flow of trade our way. But a hub port gives only half of that. It gives us centrality, the power to attract; but it does not give us leverage, the power to make the ships that call serve us first when it counts, or to train our own merchant navy.
- After all, a neutral hub holds its traffic only by staying competitive.
- It has very little long-term leverage, as the Maersk–Hapag-Lloyd "Gemini" network showed when naming Tanjung Pelepas over Singapore as its most important hub in 2025.[16] The carrier picks its ports; the port cannot pick its carriers. And when space runs short, it is the carrier that rations it, not the port.
- The sale of NOL and the stripping before it were Temasek's calls, the same Temasek that, in 2020, put fifteen billion dollars into rescuing SIA.[17]One set of hands kept one national carrier and sold the other. It was a failure of strategic judgment, and the Government should not have allowed Temasek to sell off NOL.
4. The ask: rebuild the capability, with the seriousness itdemands
- So, let us rebuild. I am asking the Government to treat sovereign shipping as what it is — a strategic capability to be rebuilt deliberately.
- If we wanted to rebuild a national carrier, we would not start from zero. Through Heliconia, Temasek holds the majority of Pacific International Lines (PIL), our largest home-grown carrier: a hundred-odd ships, profitable, strongest where the giants are thin, in Africa and the global South.[18] But Heliconia holds it the way it holds any company, as an investment for a return— it calls itself, in its own words, an "SME enabler."
- PIL is run as a profit-maximising line, by a professional chief executive, under no national duty of any kind: no obligation to reserve capacity for Singapore in a crisis, no Singaporean-crew requirement even on the ships that fly our flag, no training quota — the one voluntary scheme is winding down — and no mandatory routes it must run.
- So what is missing is a purpose. PIL could be given a national mandate: held both for a return and also to train our officers, to hold capacity that can be directed when a crisis comes — and backed to grow, over time.
- PIL's moat is a niche —Africa and the global South.[19] It is not fully the academy we need. Our port is an east-west machine: the Asia-Europe and transpacific arteries, the largest ships afloat, transhipment at a scale only those lanes generate. So the real questions are how much of the east-west capability we gave up with NOL we now have to rebuild, and how far up the ladder we are willing to climb to do it.
- Hard choices face this country again. At the floor: a national mandate over PIL as it stands — a training quota, reserved crisis capacity, a Singaporean-crew requirement on the ships that fly our flag — for a cost in the tens of millions a year. The next rung: back PIL to climb into the east-west trades, at first through slot-charters and vessel-sharing, rebuilding the operational skills our hub actually runs on.[20] At the top: own mainline tonnage outright, the capital-heavy commitment a serious rebuild demands. Each rung costs more and buys more sovereignty; the judgment is how far to climb. Standing still is also a choice — the one that ends in a port unable to crew its own senior ranks.
- We should study all the proven models. Korea's KOBC is a statutory body charged by law with maintaining an "essential national shipping system," financing the fleet and guaranteeing tonnage.[21] We too should consider a binding obligation to train our Singapore cadets.
- And be clear-eyed about the cost. Scale in the mainline trades is brutal and capital-hungry — which is why it must be state-backed, phased, and built with strategic patience. Korea built HMM over five years and several billion dollars.[22]If we were to do it, it would cost us billions too. But to balk at that cost means having almost no Singaporean sailors manning Singapore's ports.
- Ultimately, we need to decide if we are going to create a system to perpetuate Singaporeans in our own maritime industry and ports. To rebuild our own leverage over shipping capacity. Whether we are a country that means to own the ship, or one content to crew someone else's.
- Or if we want a country that doesn't have the ships to train our own people in ship faring, and that will, in the next supply shock, stand as a price-taker in its own port.
5. What is finally at stake
- France is our counterparty and a mirror: it treats the company, CMA CGM, that bought our line, NOL, as a sovereignty asset and is enlarging its national fleet, while we dismantle our sand call the matter settled. It is not settled.
- I have three questions for this Government:
- One, by the same logic that makes SIA the anchor in the air, why does a national carrier stop mattering at the water's edge?
- Two, if we mean to grow our own seafarers, how do we make a master mariner with no fleet to make him on —and who then fills the marine command our own port depends on?
- And three, when shipping space is next rationed, what capacity can Singapore actually direct?
- That the sale of Neptune Orient Lines was a very poor decision, CMA CGM's ability to turn a net profitless than one year after acquisition clearly proves.[23]
- My belief is that we must draw a line on Temasek's very poor decision to sell Neptune Orient Lines in2016, and move on to rebuild our shipping capacity, and make back the time we have lost.
[1]Singapore handled 44.66 million TEU in 2025 —the world's busiest container transhipment hub and, by total throughput, second only to Shanghai — sold 56.77 million tonnes of marine fuel (the world's largest bunkering port, "over a sixth of the fuel used by global shipping"), and saw its ship registry reach 137.46 million gross tonnage, the world's fourth-largest flag (MPA, 13 January 2026). The maritime cluster is put at around 6% of GDP (2026), and at about 7% with more than 170,000 jobs across 5,000-plus firms on the 2018 figures; DNV–Menon's Leading Maritime Cities 2024 ranks Singapore first in the world. Over 80% of world trade by volume moves by sea (UNCTAD, Review of Maritime Transport 2024 — world seaborne trade was 12.3 billion tonnes in 2023), and 23.7% of all seaborne trade, with45% of seaborne crude oil, transited the Strait of Malacca in 2023 (UNCTAD RMT2024). Singapore imports more than 90% of its food (SFA, 2024). Sources: MPA — record port performance, 2025; DNV–Menon Leading Maritime Cities 2024; UNCTAD Review of Maritime Transport 2024; SFA — Singapore Food Statistics 2024.
[2]NOL/APL was sold to France's CMA CGM in 2016 —S$1.30/share (about S$3.38 billion / US$2.4 billion); Temasek tendered its ~67%stake on 9 Jun 2016; NOL delisted that September, at less than half theS$2.80/share of a 2004 buyback offer. Sources: Ship & Bunker; Freight Waves.
[3]NOL was dismantled in stages, not just in2016: the tanker arm (American Eagle Tankers) to Malaysia's MISC for ~US$1bn in2003, on the eve of the 2004-08 tanker boom; the Alexandra Road headquarters to Fragrance Group for S$380m in 2012-13; APL Logistics to Japan's Kintetsu forUS$1.2bn in 2015; then the APL/NOL container line to CMA CGM in 2016. A full-service shipping group spans containers, tankers and dry bulk — Singapore exited all three. Sources: Akin Gump — NOL completes US$1 billion sale of American Eagle Tankers; JOC — NOL sells APL Logistics to Kintetsu for US$1.2 billion; Ship & Bunker — NOL completes sale of Singapore headquarters.
[4]At the Assises de l'Économie de la Mer, LaRochelle, 4 November 2025 (with President Macron present), CMA CGM's RodolpheSaadé announced ten new 24,000-TEU vessels would be registered under the French flag, lifting the group's French-flag fleet from 30 to 40 by 2028. France's"flotte stratégique" (Loi pour l'économie bleue 2016, Art. L2213-9 o fthe Code de la défense) lets the State requisition French-flag ships in acrisis to secure supplies and supplement the armed forces; French-flag (RIF) registration also requires French/EU officers. Sources: CMA CGM Group — announcement at the Assises de l'économie de la mer, 4 Nov 2025; Marine & Océans — coverage of the Assises; Légifrance — Loi n° 2016-816 pourl'économie bleue.
[5]After Hanjin's 2016 collapse, Korea rebuilt HMM into a top-ten line over five years with on the order of US$5-7bn of state money, through the Korea Ocean Business Corporation (established 2018) — a statutory body charged by law with maintaining an "essential national shipping system," equipped to finance new buildings and guarantee tonnage —and the Korea Development Bank. HMM posted a record ~US$6bn operating profit in2021. Sources: Splash247 — Korea Ocean Business Corporation officially launched; Korea Joong Ang Daily; Business Korea.
[6]COSCO Shipping — a Chinese central state enterprise under SASAC, fully integrated across ships, terminals and shipbuilding; the world's #4 container line and an explicit instrument of state strategy (added to the US Department of Defense's "Chinese military companies" list in January 2025; CSIS describes it as the maritime supply arm of the PLA). Sources: en.coscoshipping.com; CSIS.
[7]The pattern is documented. The UK merchant fleet fell from 33.1 to 6.7 million gross registered tons between 1975 and 1990as owners flagged out; British officer numbers aged and shrank, prompting the Tonnage Tax's Minimum Training Obligation (one cadet per fifteen officer posts)and SMarT funding (doubled to £30m in 2018) — an independent 2026 review found£4.78 returned per £1. Australia, down from about 100 trading ships three decades ago to roughly a dozen, legislated a requisition able "strategic fleet" in 2023, citing the "lack of access to berths to undertake mandatory sea time." Sources: gov.uk — Tonnage Tax minimum training commitment overview;UK DfT / Hansard; HMRC; Australian Strategic Fleet Taskforce (2023).
[8]Transport Minister Ong Ye Kung, ministerialstatement on the recovery of the aviation sector, Parliament, 6 October 2020:"For Changi aviation hub to work well and succeed, you must first have ananchor national carrier, SIA"; our hub status is "essential, evenexistential." The 2020 SIA recapitalisation was up to S$15 billion(S$5.3bn rights + up to S$9.7bn convertible bonds, 26 Mar 2020), underwrittenby Temasek. Sources: MOT; SIAS.
[9]The progression is set by the IMO STCW Convention and is gated by documented sea time, not classroom hours. On deck: cadet (about 12 months' approved sea service) → officer of the watch → chief mate → master; in the engine room: engine cadet → engineer officer → second engineer → chief engineer. A master's certificate takes, in practice, on the order of 10 to 15 years from cadet to command. Coming ashore, the sea-time requirement is real but selective: Singapore's harbour pilots must hold a master- or chief-mate-grade Certificate of Competency (PSA Marine requires Class 1 or 2, or Class 3 with watch-keeping experience, and describes its pilots as "qualified Master Mariners with command experience"), and the MPA's flag- and port-State surveyor postings require a master's or chief-engineer's certificate plus at least three years on ocean-going ships. By contrast the Port Master carries no statutory sea-time requirement — it is filled by master mariners by long convention, not by law — and marine casualty investigators are not required by the IMO to hold a certificate of competency at all. Sources: IMO — STCW Convention; PSA Marine — harbour pilots; MPA; Careers@Gov; IMO Res. A.996(25).
[10]Senior Minister of State for Transport Murali Pillai, Ministry of Transport Committee of Supply debate, 4 March 2026: he made growing "our seafarers and maritime workforce" a central thrust and paid tribute to Captain Lee Cheng Wee, a harbour pilot from the early 1970s who served as Port Master (2008-2013); the workforce tools set out were scholarships, the Maritime Cluster Fund, and management-trainee schemes. Captain M Segar's arc — PSA-sponsored cadet, harbour pilot, Port Master (to2008), then Assistant Chief Executive (Operations) of the MPA — is on the public record. Sources: MOT — SMS Murali Pillai, Committee of Supply 2026 speech; SeaVoices — Advancing Maritime Safety(Capt M Segar).
[11]Singapore has maritime degrees, but not a maritime command degree. NTU's Maritime Studies is mainly a shipping businessand management degree. The command ladder — cadet, officer of the watch, chief mate, master, harbour pilot — still depends on sea time and MPA Certificates ofCompetency, largely outside the autonomous universities. We have now built an AU-integrated pathway for pilots at SUSS, combining a bachelor's degree with acommercial pilot licence. We have no equivalent pathway for the shipmasters, harbour pilots, and marine command our port depends on.
[12]The last time the Government disclosed the split, of about 20,000 officers on Singapore-flagged ships only ~1,605 — fewer than one in twelve — were Singaporean (c. 2015-16; no current figure is published). The registry sets no nationality requirement; Wave link Maritime Institute paused cadet enrolment from 2022 to 2024; the relaunched cadet scheme targets about two dozen a year, and its cadets accumulate their sea time on foreign operators' vessels. SPS Baey Yam Keng (Maritime Manpower Forum, 19 Apr2024): MPA has "lowered the barriers of entry… compared to traditional entry requirements which may require candidates to have long seafaring experience." Sources: Sea trade Maritime — Singapore relaunches cadet training programme ;MPA — crewing a Singapore ship; MOT — SPS Baey Yam Keng at the Maritime Manpower Forum, 19 Apr 2024.
[13]The pattern is documented. The UK merchant fleet fell from 33.1 to 6.7 million gross registered tons between 1975 and 1990as owners flagged out; British officer numbers aged and shrank, prompting the Tonnage Tax's Minimum Training Obligation (one cadet per fifteen officer posts)and SMarT funding (doubled to £30m in 2018) — an independent 2026 review found£4.78 returned per £1. Australia, down from about 100 trading ships three decades ago to roughly a dozen, legislated a requisition able "strategic fleet" in 2023, citing the "lack of access to berths to undertake mandatory sea time." Sources: gov.uk — Tonnage Tax minimum training commitment overview; UK DfT / Hansard; HMRC; Australian Strategic Fleet Taskforce (2023).
[14]In the Red Sea crisis the diversion around theCape of Good Hope absorbed roughly 9% of effective global container capacity(J.P. Morgan, Feb 2024); with space rationed, analysts reported that carriersstill sailing gave preference to exporters under their own flag. Korea directedthe state-controlled HMM to ring-fence container slots for Korean firms in boththe pandemic and the Red Sea crisis. Sources: J.P. Morgan; Lloyd's List (Dec2024); Container News.
[15]Acting Minister for Transport Jeffrey Siow, written reply to a parliamentary question by the author, 8 April 2026:resilience rests on "diversifying our sources, maintaining our position as a trusted global hub, and strengthening international partnerships," with" a wide network of global shipping lines" reducing "dependence on any one operator." The reply does not mention a national carrier or PIL. Source: MOT — written reply on essential supply lines during regional conflicts or naval disruptions, 8 Apr 2026.
[16]A neutral hub holds its traffic only by staying competitive. When Maersk moved its regional transhipment hub from Singapore to Malaysia's Tanjung Pelepas in 2000 (about a tenth of PSA Singapore's volume), Singapore's container throughput fell about 9% in a year, and Evergreen followed in 2002; in 2025 the Maersk–Hapag-Lloyd"Gemini" network named Tanjung Pelepas, not Singapore, its most important hub. Sources: SCMP — Maersk move to Tanjung weighs on result; The Loadstar — Maersk on Tanjung Pelepas, its "most important hub" in the Gemini network; Freight Waves.
[17]Ho Ching was chief executive of Temasek Holdings from 2004 to 2021 — the period covering the sale of NOL's headquarters(2012), its logistics arm (2015) and the container line itself (2016), and the2020 recapitalisation of Singapore Airlines. Sources: Temasek; public record.
[18]Pacific International Lines (PIL), founded1967 — Singapore's largest home-grown carrier and the world's ~12th-largestline (~100 ships), with a moat in Africa (served since the 1970s) and the global South. Heliconia Capital, a Temasek unit, took a majority economic stake in a US$600 million rescue completed March 2021 (structured largely as convertible preference shares), diluting the founding Teo family to about 15%;PIL has since returned to profit and self-funds a fleet-renewal programme. The exact Heliconia percentage has never been publicly disclosed and no later change is on the public record — an ACRA corporate search would confirm the current figure. Sources: Sea trade Maritime; Maritime Executive.
[19]Pacific International Lines (PIL), founded1967 — Singapore's largest home-grown carrier and the world's ~12th-largestline (~100 ships), with a moat in Africa (served since the 1970s) and the global South. Heliconia Capital, a Temasek unit, took a majority economic stake in a US$600 million rescue completed March 2021 (structured largely as convertible preference shares), diluting the founding Teo family to about 15%; PIL has since returned to profit and self-funds a fleet-renewal programme. The exact Heliconia percentage has never been publicly disclosed and no later change is on the public record — an ACRA corporate search would confirm the current figure. Sources: Sea trade Maritime; Maritime Executive.
[20]Independent lines without alliance membership reach the east-west trades through slot-charters and vessel-sharing agreements— PIL already runs such deals with COSCO and Wan Hai. PIL's existing moat is the African and global-South trades the major alliances serve thinly (Africa since the 1970s, ~30 countries). Sources: US FMC filings; Sea trade Maritime; Pacific International Lines.
[21]After Hanjin's 2016 collapse, Korea rebuilt HMM into a top-ten line over five years with on the order of US$5-7bn of state money, through the Korea Ocean Business Corporation (established 2018) — a statutory body charged by law with maintaining an "essential national shipping system," equipped to finance new buildings and guarantee tonnage —and the Korea Development Bank. HMM posted a record ~US$6bn operating profit in2021. Sources: Splash247 — Korea Ocean Business Corporation officially launched; Korea Joong Ang Daily; Business Korea.
[22]Building a top-tier mainline carrier is genuinely capital-hungry — on the order of US$4-8 billion in vessels to reach~1m TEU, against the three lines that hold ~47% of the market — which is why NOL, at ~2.5% share, lost money for a decade and why a rebuild must be state-backed, phased and purpose-driven rather than left to the market. The point is not that scale is cheap; it is that the serious maritime states pay for it deliberately because the capability is worth it. Sources: Alphaliner; VesselsLink — newbuild container-ship prices up more than 50% year-on-year (2024). Illustrative magnitudes.
[23]CMA CGM completed its acquisition of NOL/APLin mid-2016; within a year APL posted a US$26 million net profit in Q1 2017 —its first quarterly operating profit since 2011 — and contributed about US$340million to CMA CGM's 2017 operating income. CMA CGM swung from a US$452m lossin 2016 to US$701m net income in 2017, on the back of the APL turnaround(helped by a wider freight-rate recovery that year). Sources: Seatrade Maritime; The Loadstar; FreightWaves.
