Riding on productivity

IT IS rare to hear a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) boss speak as glowingly of Singapore's ongoing productivity drive as Victor Khaw does, but then, his firm AllAlloy has been a benefactor of the national campaign in immediate and evident ways. Often, even the SMEs that acknowledge the longer-term benefits of upgrading their equipment or improving processes continue to struggle against manpower shortages and higher wage bills in the short term. Happily for AllAlloy - whose 37-strong staff in Singapore is largely comprised of residents - the welding equipment and solutions that it sells are precisely those that other companies are now on the lookout for to raise productivity.

Because of this, general manager Mr Khaw said, AllAlloy's sales by geography have taken an unusual trajectory. Most local SMEs start out with Singapore as their dominant market, before venturing to gain market share in foreign markets. But things have gone in the opposite direction for AllAlloy.

For the first three years since the firm's incorporation in 2008, revenues from Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia's Riau Islands each made up about a third of overall turnover each. But after Singapore launched its productivity drive in 2010, local sales shot up to contribute half of revenue, even as export sales continued to grow.