AS WE welcome the Year of the Dragon with wishes for peace and prosperity, some lingering troubles from the past year are clinging to the dragon’s tail. 

Tech giant Meta told its Singapore landlord in June last year that it would not renew its lease for seven floors of prime office space at South Beach Tower, Kalpana Rashiwala reports. The 115,000 square feet of space that Meta occupied is roughly 22 per cent of the building’s total office space. The landlord is negotiating with a replacement tenant for two floors, while the rest of the space is reworked. Meta has moved staff into its offices at Marina One, where it is said to be leasing 500,000 sq ft of space.  

Is Meta’s exit from a grade A office building in downtown Singapore a foreshadowing of more vacancies to come? Granted, the social media giant’s cutback came out of earlier announced news - it rolled out a second round of job cuts in March last year. But 2023 closed with a fresh round of sobering disclosures of mass global layoffs in many industries, from tech to banks to consumer businesses. The spectre of shadow space in Singapore’s office sector may be looming again.