Our Heritage

The Singtel heritage can be traced to the late 19th century when Singapore was a thriving trading hub connecting East and West. Our history is closely tied to the rapid growth of the economy and innovations in telecommunications.

Singtel has been connecting people and businesses through more than 140 years of changing communications technology. 1979 was a milestone year which marked the centennial of telephone services in Singapore. We have come a long way since the days of phone operators, payphone and pagers.

The 1990s mark the makings of Singtel as a regional multinational corporation. Our move overseas was spurred by the global deregulation of the telecoms market, starting in the 1980s. Knowing deregulation would reach our shores, we started preparing for competition by venturing abroad.

We continue to invest in upgrading, modernising through digital transformation initiatives and equipping our people and systems with new capabilities to ensure we are able to deliver innovative and relevant services to our customers.

The arrival of 5G brings the opportunity to supercharge the future, by reconfiguring how technology, data and services are deployed to meet consumers’ needs, transforming industries and cities in the process. We have embarked on a strategic reset aimed at capturing untapped digital growth in the 5G era and are making good progress by reinvigorating our core consumer and enterprise businesses, developing new growth engines through NCS, digital banking and data centre business, as well as unlocking the value of our portfolio of assets.