Gala celebration of Singapore's Top 50 companies

BUSINESS leaders and VIPs turned up to honour and celebrate the accomplishments of Singapore's top 50 privately held companies at the Enterprise 50 (E50) Awards gala dinner on Nov 26. The annual black-tie event was held once again at Resorts World Convention Centre. This year's guest of honour was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Heng Swee Keat.

Jointly organised by The Business Times and KPMG in Singapore, and sponsored by OCBC Bank, the E50 Awards also celebrated its 25th anniversary this year. The event's supporters include Enterprise Singapore, Singapore Business Federation and Singapore Exchange.

Many of this year's winning cohort shared the same secret to their success: transformation.

2019's overall winner, Agorae Pte Ltd, for instance, started riding the digital economy wave as early as 2012; and has now seen its efforts pay off handsomely. Second-placed Soilbuild Group Holdings, meanwhile, shifted its focus from residential to industrial developments to diversify its business and has also ventured overseas to Myanmar, Vietnam and as far as Liverpool in the United Kingdom, to stay ahead of the competition.

Just like the winning companies past and present, E50 also kept up with the times. This year, it introduced the first special Digital Economy Award for the event's 25th anniversary. It was awarded to M-DAQ Pte Ltd, which has been identified as an up-and-coming billion-dollar company. The decade-old fintech startup will earn access to the KPMG-A*Star Joint Lab, a data-science powered laboratory in the professional services sector.