The Singapore State of Business Growth 2025: Part 1
Singapore’s Growth Landscape in 2025
Growth isn’t about pushing harder — it’s about moving with greater clarity and impact.
Singapore's Growth Leaders: What Sets Them Apart
The growth equation has fundamentally changed. In 2025, the businesses pulling ahead aren't just working harder—they're working smarter, moving faster, and adapting quicker when strategies stop working. Our research reveals exactly what separates Singapore's growth leaders from everyone else.
The Performance Reality
60% Report Outperformance Despite Economic Headwinds
Singaporean business leaders report strong performance despite challenging conditions. Even amid growing economic complexity including trade and tariff headwinds, 60% of companies with cross-border operations report outperforming peers over the past 12 months — and 15% report significantly outperforming.
Financial & Insurance Services: The Digital Leaders
Financial and insurance services companies are faring especially well — and a key reason may be their digital advantage.
more likely than the average business in Singapore to be fully digitalised (34% vs. 20% average)
more likely to have fully integrated systems (30% vs. 15%)
more likely to have advanced AI implementation (32% vs. 16%)
This level of digital sophistication translates to growth:
report somewhat or significantly outperforming their peers, which is 28% higher than the average.
This trend isn’t limited to one sector. Across the board, businesses with higher levels of digitalisation, AI maturity, and system integration consistently report outperforming their peers.
Fully digitalised companies are over
more likely to report significant growth.
Businesses with advanced AI adoption are over
more likely to report strong performance.
Those with fully integrated systems are over
more likely to report significantly outperforming their peers.
So what's driving this dramatic performance gap? The answer lies in how businesses approach growth itself.
What's Actually Driving Growth in 2025
Businesses attribute growth to a combination of digital transformation (43%), customer experience improvements (43%), and pricing strategy adjustments (40%). These levers reflect a shift toward more strategic execution, with a growing emphasis on technology, customer value, and commercial agility.
Thomas Jeng, Global Head of Startups, Aspire
Aspire, an all-in-one financial operating system, scales using HubSpot’s unified customer platform. “Unified customer data is absolutely critical to our growth. Having a consistent CRM framework across markets allows us to streamline processes, deliver consistent service experiences, and make better-informed decisions faster without reinventing the wheel.”
Size Matters: How Growth Strategy Changes by Scale
While these core growth drivers—digital transformation, customer experience, and pricing strategy—appear across all businesses, how they're prioritised and executed varies dramatically by company size and resources.
Small businesses (under 50 employees) are in acquisition mode, focused on generating demand with limited teams and resources. 42% prioritise marketing and sales optimisation that will power expansion.
Mid-market companies (50-199 employees) are in transformation mode. These businesses are scaling and need robust systems to align across multiple teams and geographies—which is why 49% lead with digital transformation initiatives.
Large enterprises (200+ employees) shift to optimisation mode. These businesses are more mature with higher baseline digitalisation, so they're now focused on driving ROI and productivity across complex organisations. 53% prioritise operational efficiency as their primary growth driver.
The Growth Blockers: What's Really Holding Businesses Back
While growth strategies vary by company size, certain challenges affect businesses across all segments. The top barriers reveal the complex challenges businesses are navigating: economic uncertainty (45%) leads the concerns, followed by limited capital (35%), technology integration challenges (32%), and talent shortages (32%)
"Based on my experience as an agency working with iconic Singapore businesses, I believe that the best way to balance innovation with economic caution is to treat innovation like a diversified investment portfolio with multiple small bets rather than massive all-or-nothing bets. This strategy allows companies to test new ideas without risking their core business. When a small experiment shows promise, you can double down. When it doesn't, you pivot quickly while maintaining business continuity."
Juliana Chan, PhD Founder, Find Your Superpower
Yet among the most digitally advanced businesses, a different and unexpected pattern emerges.
The Internal Ceiling: When Technology Outpaces Leadership
The hidden barrier for digitally advanced companies
It's a leadership hesitancy paradox: the more sophisticated the technology, the more likely companies are to hit internal bottlenecks. Here's what the data reveals:
Despite tech readiness, many still struggle to act quickly on insight or scale efficiently. So what’s the deeper issue?
“We see this pattern repeatedly — businesses invest in advanced technology but then hit an internal ceiling. Technology adoption without leadership alignment doesn’t deliver speed. When leaders hesitate or decision-making processes remain slow, even the most sophisticated systems in the world can’t move the needle. The companies breaking through are those where leadership drives urgency from the top.”
Carol Fong, Head of Asia, HubSpot
What’s Separating Successful Businesses in 2025?
The ability to grow while preserving speed is what separates successful from average businesses. Organisational structures and decision-making processes need to be as streamlined as your systems. Here’s where leaders can start to address roadblocks and unlock their teams' potential.
- 🚀 Fast Implementation Empower fast onboarding and team enablement by adopting tools that are easy to use and low-lift to implement — addressing both integration complexity and talent constraints.
- 🎯 Strategy-First Technology Design your tech stack based on what you need to accomplish, not the other way around — before bringing tools onboard, understand your strategy and how your tech will help you execute.
- 🔗 Unified Operations Reduce friction by using unified customer platforms and integrated systems — disconnected systems and data silos slow execution and waste limited capital.
- 👥 Culture of Speed Start with a culture of digitalisation from the top — align teams, drive urgency, and prioritise smarter execution from the leadership team and throughout the organisation.
But here's what many leaders miss: having the right strategy is only half the battle. The other half is getting your people to embrace it.
