Rebuilding a National Shipping Line
Motion on Singapore as a Global Transport Hub · 7 July 2026
1. We surrendered a sovereign capability — at the worst moment
Singapore is a maritime nation in the fullest sense — the world’s busiest container transhipment port, the world’s largest bunkering hub, and by one global ranking the leading maritime city on the planet. The sea is not one sector among many for us; it is the foundation we were built on. We are an island that imports more than nine in ten of our calories across the water, and we sit astride the Strait of Malacca, through which roughly a quarter of all seaborne trade and nearly half the world’s seaborne crude oil moves. A nation this dependent on the sea cannot safely treat the capability to move on it as a commodity to be rented. Yet over two decades we quietly gave away one of its core sovereign capabilities — a shipping line of our own. Neptune Orient Lines (NOL), the national carrier, was sold to France’s CMA CGM in 2016, the last act in a long dismantling: the tanker fleet to Malaysia in 2003, the headquarters in 2012, the logistics arm in 2015, then the line itself. In so doing, we exited an entire strategic domain.
We did this right as every serious maritime nation moved the other way. France is putting ten of the world’s largest ships under its flag as a “strategic fleet” — requisitionable in a crisis, crewed by its own officers — using CMA CGM, the very company that bought our line. Korea, after Hanjin collapsed the same year we sold NOL, poured state billions into rebuilding HMM into a top-ten carrier through a dedicated sovereign vehicle. China built COSCO into an arm of national power. Even Australia, down to a dozen trading ships, is legislating a national strategic fleet. These are not nostalgists. They are states that understand shipping is a strategic capability, not a commodity service to be rented.
And our own Government knows this — in the air! “For Changi to work well and succeed,” it told this House, “you must first have an anchor national carrier, SIA”; when SIA neared collapse, Temasek put in up to fifteen billion dollars to keep it alive. SIA and NOL were both Temasek operators. We treat the airline, SIA, as strategic and rescue it; but we treat the sea carrier, NOL, as a commodity and sell it. Temasek has since bought into a different carrier — Pacific International Lines (PIL) — but we hold it for a return, not for a purpose; so Singapore stands as a major maritime hub with no national line of its own.
It sold NOL on the argument that container shipping is fungible — the box does not care whose ship it rides in. It does not defend SIA on those grounds at all. It keeps the airline because a national carrier is a strategic asset in its own right: a capability the country controls, the people it trains, and the option to direct it in a crisis. The Government has not stopped believing a national carrier is strategic — it has only stopped believing it for the sea.
2. What a national line actually is — the full strategic value
The case for selling NOL rested on a category error: that a shipping line is just freight, and freight is fungible. It is not. A national line is two strategic capabilities bound together.
First, it is the academy that makes our maritime people. There is a ladder that runs from the deck of a ship to the command of a port, and every rung is built on the one below. It begins at sea: a cadet stands his watches and qualifies as an officer of the watch, then as chief mate, and — a decade or more on — as master; the engine room climbs the same way to chief engineer. None of it can be done in a classroom or bought with a grant, because each certificate is the legal product of documented sea time on a working ship. That sea time is then the entry ticket for the shore roles that keep a great port’s waters safe: the harbour pilot who boards and berths the largest ships afloat, and the surveyors who inspect them, must by the rules hold those certificates, and above them sits the Port Master — the statutory officer who can order any vessel in our waters to move, stop or stay. Singapore’s Port Masters have been a line of master mariners: Captain M Segar, who came up as a cadet, then a harbour pilot, then Port Master, and rose to Assistant Chief Executive of the MPA; and Captain Lee Cheng Wee, the harbour pilot of the early 1970s whom the Government held up in this year’s Budget debate as the example for the next generation. No one is made a master mariner by a scholarship.
Marine command is the one part of the port that still requires a master’s ticket, and we are failing. Fewer than one in twelve officers on our own flag is Singaporean; our cadets must seek their sea time on foreign ships, and may face a lack of access. Britain watched its officer corps age and shrink as its fleet flagged out, then had to pay shipowners through the tax code to train cadets again; Australia, down from a hundred trading ships to about a dozen, is now legislating a strategic fleet to rebuild the skills it lost. Ships can be bought or chartered within a year; a generation of sea-experienced Singaporeans takes a generation to grow. When Temasek sold NOL it crystallised a financial gain, a one-time figure on a balance sheet, and sold the training ground the whole ladder stands on. Cut the fleet away at the foot of the ladder and, a decade and more on, the top of it empties. We have been in search of lost time ever since, in the long run, the seafaring core of our own port — our harbour pilots and the marine command above them — cannot be kept Singaporean; it must be staffed, like our flag already is, by other nations’ officers.
Second, it is directable capacity — the difference between sovereignty and dependence in a crisis. Container space is rationed whenever effective capacity is squeezed faster than it can be replaced: a demand surge like the pandemic, when rates rose sevenfold; or a risk-driven diversion like the Red Sea, where rerouting every ship around Africa swallowed a tenth of the world’s capacity at a stroke. In such a crunch the market does not serve all comers equally — the carriers still sailing gave priority to exporters under their own flag, Korea ordered HMM to ring-fence space for Korean firms, and a nation relying on foreign lines is served last, at whatever price is named. A country that owns no capacity in a capacity crunch is a beggar for allocation, and will be served with all others.
3. The Government’s defence does not survive scrutiny
I put this to the Government in April. Its answer was that our supply lines are secured by diversification, our standing as a trusted hub, and “a wide network of global shipping lines.” I respectfully disagree, and think it conflates the port and the carrier.
It turns on an ambiguity in the word “node.” When we call ourselves a node, we mean leverage — some power to bend the flow of trade our way. But a hub port gives only half of that. It gives us centrality, the power to attract; but it does not give us leverage, the power to make the ships that call serve us first when it counts, or to train our own merchant navy.
After all, a neutral hub holds its traffic only by staying competitive — and even winning that competition is not the same as holding leverage.
While Singapore is still the world’s largest transhipment hub, the Maersk–Hapag-Lloyd “Gemini” network still chose Tanjung Pelepas over Singapore as its most important hub in 2025. The carrier picks its ports; the port cannot pick its carriers. And when space runs short, it is the carrier that rations it, not the port.
The sale of NOL and the stripping before it were Temasek’s calls, the same Temasek that, in 2020, put fifteen billion dollars into rescuing SIA. One set of hands kept one national carrier and sold the other. It was a failure of strategic judgment, and the Government should not have allowed Temasek to sell off NOL.
4. The ask: rebuild the capability
So, let us rebuild. I am asking the Government to treat sovereign shipping as what it is — a strategic capability to be rebuilt deliberately.
If we wanted to rebuild a national carrier, we would not start from zero. Through Heliconia, Temasek holds the majority of Pacific International Lines (PIL), our largest home-grown carrier: a hundred-odd ships, profitable, strongest where the giants are thin, in Africa and the global South. But Heliconia holds it the way it holds any company, as an investment for a return — it calls itself, in its own words, an “SME enabler.”
PIL is run as a profit-maximising line, by a professional chief executive, under no national duty of any kind: no obligation to reserve capacity for Singapore in a crisis, no Singaporean-crew requirement even on the ships that fly our flag, no training quota — the one voluntary scheme is winding down — and no mandatory routes it must run.
So what is missing is a purpose. PIL could be given a national mandate: held both for a return and also to train our officers, to hold capacity that can be directed when a crisis comes — and backed to grow, over time.
PIL’s moat is a niche — Africa and the global South. It is not fully the academy we need. Our port is an east-west machine: the Asia-Europe and transpacific arteries, the largest ships afloat, transhipment at a scale only those lanes generate. So the real questions are how much of the east-west capability we gave up with NOL we now have to rebuild, and how far up the ladder we are willing to climb to do it.
Hard choices face this country again. At the floor: a national mandate over PIL as it stands — a training quota, reserved crisis capacity, a Singaporean-crew requirement on the ships that fly our flag — for a cost in the tens of millions a year. The next rung: back PIL to climb into the east-west trades, at first through slot-charters and vessel-sharing, rebuilding the operational skills our hub actually runs on. At the top: own mainline tonnage outright, the capital-heavy commitment a serious rebuild demands. Each rung costs more and buys more sovereignty; the judgment is how far to climb. Standing still is also a choice — the one that ends in a port unable to crew its own senior ranks.
We should study all the proven models. Korea’s KOBC is a statutory body charged by law with maintaining an “essential national shipping system,” financing the fleet and guaranteeing tonnage. We too should consider a binding obligation to train our Singapore cadets.
And be clear-eyed about the cost. Scale in the mainline trades is brutal and capital-hungry — which is why it must be state-backed, phased, and built with strategic patience. Korea built HMM over five years and several billion dollars. If we were to do it, it would cost us billions too. But to balk at that cost means having almost no Singaporean sailors manning Singapore’s ports.
Ultimately, we need to decide if we are going to create a system to perpetuate Singaporeans in our own maritime industry and ports. To rebuild our own leverage over shipping capacity. Whether we are a country that means to own the ship, or one content to crew someone else’s.
Or if we want a country that doesn’t have the ships to train our own people in shipfaring, and that will, in the next supply shock, stand as a price-taker in its own port.
5. What is finally at stake
Speaker, in conclusion.
France is our counterparty and a mirror: it treats the company, CMA CGM, that bought our line, NOL, as a sovereignty asset and is enlarging its national fleet, while we dismantle ours and call the matter settled. It is not settled.
I have three questions for this Government:
One, by the same logic that makes SIA the anchor in the air, why does a national carrier stop mattering at the water’s edge?
Two, if we mean to grow our own seafarers, how do we make a master mariner with no fleet to make him/her on — and who then fills the marine command our own port depends on?
And three, when shipping space is next rationed, what capacity can Singapore actually direct?
That the sale of Neptune Orient Lines was a very poor decision, CMA CGM’s ability to turn a net profit less than one year after acquisition clearly proves.
My belief is that we must draw a line on Temasek’s very poor decision to sell Neptune Orient Lines in 2016, and move on to rebuild our shipping capacity, and make back the time we have lost.