The news broke last month: the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Informa Group Limited, the world’s largest professional exhibition organiser by revenue. For those paying attention to Singapore’s longer arc, it was less a surprise than a confirmation – another structural piece of a strategy that is being assembled with considerable deliberate care.
“It is important for us,” says Ong Huey Hong, who Boardroom met at IMEX Frankfurt. “It really underpins the confidence that they have in Singapore.”
A three-year partnership, the MOU has three pillars. The first is business development: a set of identified shows, in healthcare and financial services, but also MRO (aligned with advanced manufacturing) and photonics (semiconductors), that Informa is already bringing or will bring to Singapore over the next decade. The second is experience development: a joint effort to ‘festivalize’ selected Informa events, taking delegates out of the convention hall and into the city. The third is what STB calls strategic interest: sustainability and talent development, the two non-negotiable foundations of Singapore’s MICE ambition.
What makes the deal legible is the target it feeds into. Singapore has set itself the goal of tripling MICE tourism receipts by 2040, as part of a broader Tourism 2040 vision aiming for S$47 to S$50 billion in total tourism receipts. “MICE visitors spend nearly twice that of a leisure visitor,” Ong notes. It’s a statistic the industry knows, but Singapore is banking on it harder than most.
Geography as Strategy
The arithmetic behind the target is not arbitrary. Singapore sits at the centre of a regional population of 3.8 billion – India, China, Southeast Asia – much of it on a curve toward middle-class status and the trade relationships, professional associations, and knowledge exchanges that come with it.
“The Asia Pacific is actually the fastest growing region,” Ong says. “We feel that for our location, it is actually poised for growth. That’s why we set this very ambitious target.”
For associations, the geography argument is reinforced by a pipeline that is already stretching well beyond the immediate horizon. Confirmed events for 2026 and 2027 include the ASEAN International Coffee Summit, Solana Summit APAC, HIMSS26 APAC, the health IT congress, and the WCA Worldwide Conference 2027. Some bids already secured extend to 2032.
“Association and congress events rotate globally, and the lead time is long,” Ong acknowledges. “Some of the events we have secured are beyond 2030.”
The Local Ambassador Model
Asked how associations specifically fit into the tripling target amid exhibitions and incentive travel, Ong describes a bid strategy that will be familiar to anyone who has followed how medical congresses actually get won or lost.
STB has formalised a partnership with the Academy of Medicine Singapore, which counts over 4,000 doctors among its members and comprises 13 colleges and six chapters. The goal is to work through that institutional network to jointly bid for international events, and where needed, identify local associations capable of strengthening these bids. “Our aim is really to work with our local associations as a potential partner to bid for the international events,” she says. “We want to work with them to identify whereby we can together put up very compelling ways to anchor some of these medical events in Singapore.”
A second partnership, a three-way MOU between STB, ASAE (the American Society of Association Executives) and the Singapore Business Federation, targets the trade association layer. The SBF has around 20,000 members across its affiliated bodies. STB’s plan is to reach those associations, train them, and convert them into bid-ready partners. “Our goal is also to reach out to their association members, upskill them,” Ong says. “So that we can work in partnership with them to launch bids to secure international shows.”
It is the same model that drives congress success in Paris, Barcelona, or some of Singapore’s Asian neighbours… but with the scale and institutional bandwidth that Singapore’s governance model makes unusually achievable.
Sectors, Old & New
STB’s sector targeting is neither static nor especially surprising at its core: healthcare and life sciences, financial services, advanced manufacturing. These are the pillars of the Singapore economy, and its MICE strategy maps onto them with pragmatic precision.
What is more interesting is what Ong identifies on the emerging edge: green financing, climate and sustainability events, and, with notable specificity, space technology. “For Singapore, we always review our economic strategies,” she says. “Some areas that we feel there is a lot of opportunity include green financing, a lot of climate shows, sustainability shows, financial services, advanced manufacturing, and space technology.”
The juxtaposition of HIMSS26 APAC and Solana Summit APAC on the confirmed calendar is not incidental. It reflects an STB that is consciously hedging across the established (health IT infrastructure) and the next-generation (blockchain and Web3 infrastructure). Whether Singapore can credibly serve both, over time, is the more interesting question; but the positioning is deliberate.
Sustainability: Beyond the Brochure
On sustainability, Singapore has numbers that most destinations cannot match. The city-state was the first to apply for and receive GSTC destination-level certification from the Global Sustainable Tourism Council. As of late last year, 73% of Singapore’s hotel room stock had attained some form of recognised sustainability certification, national or international. All six major MICE venues hold equivalent certifications. Within the Singapore Association of Convention & Exhibition Organisers & Suppliers (SACEOS) 80% of members are certified.
“We pushed very hard on sustainability,” Ong says. “I’m very proud to say we exceeded all the targets.”
But she is also candid about where the conversation is moving. Certification and carbon targets, she suggests, are now table stakes: the baseline below which you are simply disqualified from certain procurement processes.
The frontier, for Singapore, is legacy. “Now we think that what is even more important is societal impact,” she says. “When you have an event in a destination, you have to have positive lasting impact.” Singapore has launched a Legacy Toolkit and is working to embed it into event design; a recognition, familiar from the European congress circuit, that impact is no longer just about carbon offsets but about what a congress actually changes on the ground.
The New Hub
The interview’s most concrete revelation came almost in passing. STB is studying the development a new downtown MICE hub, envisioned to be the largest convention facility in Singapore’s city centre, located near Marina Bay and adjacent to Straits View ara. A new wellness attraction (Therme, a mineral water and wellness complex) will be among its neighbours when both come on stream by the mid-2030s.
The tender process is expected to launch in 2027, following an initial request for information from potential developers and operators. The working vision, Ong suggests, has something of a convention district feel – delegate experience integrated into an urban neighbourhood rather than isolated in a purpose-built complex.
“The location we have identified is in close proximity to some of these attractions,” she says. “It is very easy for delegates.”
The detail matters because it connects directly to STB’s festivalization agenda – the explicit push, anchored in the Informa MOU, to pull delegates out of the session room and into the city. A convention hub embedded in a walkable precinct is not just an infrastructure investment; it is an event design statement.
To organise your next conference in Singapore, visit www.visitsingapore.com/mice