That accountability structure deserves acknowledgement. But a frank question must be asked: is Value Unlock, as currently designed, sufficient to achieve what institutional investors actually require before committing serious capital to a Singapore-listed company? The programme is a necessary first step. On its own, it is not enough.
What Value Unlock actually is and what it requires
The programme comprises two grants. The Equip Grant provides up to $15,000 at 50% co-funding for training in four areas: investor relations, media communications, corporate strategy and financial management. The more substantive Elevate Grant provides up to $200,000 at the same co-funding ratio for professional consulting engagements. Eligibility for the Elevate Grant requires a minimum market capitalisation of $100 million for Mainboard companies and $80 million for Catalist companies.
Elevate Grant recipients carry explicit obligations beyond completing the engagement: participation in investor engagement activities, publication of improvement plans and public disclosure of progress against those commitments. These obligations are more consequential than they may appear.
When a company publishes an improvement plan and commits to progress disclosures, it is not completing an administrative formality. It is making a public statement visible to the very institutional investors it is trying to attract. A company that completes a consulting engagement, holds investor meetings and publishes an improvement plan, but demonstrates no meaningful change in institutional ownership, analyst coverage or capital efficiency, will have met the letter of the process without achieving its purpose. The gap between activity and outcome is what will determine whether Value Unlock produces genuine investability improvements or a well-funded round of communications exercises.
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Three months since the programme’s announcement, market conversations among boards, service providers and intermediaries remain disproportionately focused on eligibility and grant quantum rather than on what outcomes the programme expects companies to demonstrate. That gap in understanding is itself part of the problem Value Unlock is trying to solve.
The market structure value unlock must change
A bottom-up analysis of SGX’s 613 listed companies reveals a deeply bifurcated exchange. At one end, 68 companies (11% of listings) meet institutional-grade standards of ROE of at least 8% and market capitalisation above $500 million. These 68 companies hold approximately $813.5 billion, or two-thirds of total market capitalisation. They are the companies that institutional investors can and do own at scale.
At the other end, 246 companies (40% of listings) are loss-making. In between lies a structurally hollow middle: 103 profitable but sub-scale Quality Orphans (17% of listings), with ROE above cost of equity but averaging only $150 million in market capitalisation, too small for institutional mandates; and 196 Value Destroyers (32% of listings), earning positive accounting profits but below cost of equity, correctly reflected in an average price-to-book ratio of 0.86 times.
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The Elevate Grant is well-calibrated for the Quality Orphan cohort, the programme’s most natural target. These are fundamentally sound businesses whose primary challenge may be genuine obscurity: institutional investors simply do not know they exist. For the 52 Quality Orphans who meet the eligibility thresholds (39 Mainboard and 13 Catalist), improved investor relations and clearer strategy communication could meaningfully reduce that discovery discount. The programme is appropriately targeted here (See Chart 1).
The more complex question concerns Value Destroyers that also meet the eligibility threshold. As Lai Yeu Huan, head of asian equity at Amova Asset Management — one of the fund managers appointed by MAS under the Equity Market Development Programme (EQDP), observed at SGX’s own Value Unlock panel: “What matters most is harnessing fundamental change. When we see value, we ask if there is fundamental change going on... if there’s seriously no change, no intention of changing, no ability to change, then that’s where we call it a value trap. We’re not in undervalued companies for its own sake.”
A company earning below its cost of capital is not undiscovered. It is correctly priced. No investor relations programme, however well delivered, changes that arithmetic.
Japan and Korea went structurally further
Singapore’s Value Unlock has drawn comparisons to corporate value-up initiatives in Japan and South Korea. The structural architecture of all three, however, differs significantly in ambition and mechanism (See Chart 2).
Japan’s programme, driven by the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) from 2023, targeted a specific and publicly observable problem: the large proportion of companies on its top-tier Prime market — Japan’s institutional-grade listed companies, the equivalents of STI constituents and blue-chips in Singapore’s context — are trading persistently below book value. The TSE required all companies to disclose improvement plans publicly, named those that had not responded, and used institutional peer pressure as its enforcement mechanism. No grants were involved. By early 2026, 91% of Prime market companies had disclosed improvement plans and the proportion trading below book value has declined measurably.
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South Korea’s programme, announced in early 2024 and formalised with the launch of the Korea Value-Up Index in September 2024, targeted the structural undervaluation arising from complex chaebol ownership structures. Korea added two elements absent from Singapore’s design: a dedicated Korea Value-Up Index directing institutional capital toward compliant companies, and tax incentives for firms meeting programme criteria. The incentive to comply was financial and structural, not aspirational.
Singapore’s Value Unlock is the most incentive-based and least coercive of the three. It funds capability-building through subsidised training and consulting. It does not attach participation to a publicly measurable national benchmark, no price-to-book floor, no ROE minimum and no free float threshold against which companies are named and measured. Without such a benchmark, the peer pressure and capital flow mechanisms that drove Japan’s 91% compliance rate have no operational basis in Singapore’s context.
This reflects a deliberate design choice. Singapore’s domestic institutional investor base — approximately $20 billion invested through Singapore-focused funds, with 0.5% of the $4 trillion in AUM domiciled here — is materially thinner than Japan’s, limiting the reward side of any comply-or-be-named mechanism. Whether the programme’s non-coercive design reflects appropriate calibration to Singapore’s specific market structure or insufficient structural ambition is what its outcomes over the next 12 to 18 months will determine.
What institutional investors actually require
Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, long regarded as the most prominent champion of the shareholder value doctrine and later its most prominent critic, told the Financial Times in March 2009 that the idea of shareholder value as a management strategy was a “dumb idea”, adding: “It is the product of your combined efforts, from the management to the employees.” At SGX’s own Value Unlock panel, Michael Tang, head of listing compliance at SGX RegCo, invoked this principle directly: “For a company to unlock value, you need to understand where you stand and what your competitive advantages are, and then leverage on that. Unlocking value itself is not the strategy; it is the end result.”
That this distinction between shareholder value as a consequence of good strategy and as an objective in its own right was articulated by the most celebrated corporate executive of his generation and invoked by Singapore’s own listing regulator at the same event, yet remains widely misunderstood among listed companies, is itself a diagnosis of the challenge this programme must address.
The PRICE framework — a proprietary governance lens built on three decades of institutional investment experience, including 16 years at Temasek — identifies five dimensions that institutional investors systematically examine before committing capital:
Performance and per-share value creation;
Resilience and downside protection;
Incentives, information integrity and investor relations;
Capital structure, allocation and capital markets readiness; and
Enduring competitive edge.
It is a lens for boards to evaluate strategy, capital, and management the way a rigorous institutional portfolio manager would, before the market does it for them (See Chart 3).
Value Unlock partially addresses the communications, financial management and strategic articulation dimensions of three of those five pillars. Some will argue that the Corporate Strategy capability area is broad enough in scope to encompass the remaining two: capital structure and resilience. This may be true for an ambitious engagement with a skilled adviser, and future director training may cover the theory of these topics more comprehensively still. But knowing what needs to be done is not the same as doing it.
The structural work of actually improving ROE, widening free float and building a genuine competitive moat cannot be substituted by training or delegated to a consulting engagement.
Furthermore, the programme’s own KPIs measure investor engagement activity, not whether companies have improved their returns on capital, strengthened their balance sheets or built more defensible competitive positions. Scope does not equal obligation. The gap between what the programme permits and what it requires is where the accountability question lies.
That gap is most visible in the free float constraint. Singapore’s minimum free float of 10% compares poorly with Hong Kong and Bursa Malaysia, both of which require 25%. More telling still: Indonesia, facing a threat from MSCI in January 2026 to downgrade it to frontier market status over transparency concerns, has already moved its minimum free float from 7.5% to 15%, above Singapore’s current threshold, as part of an urgent capital market reform programme. The pressure on Singapore’s own free float standard is therefore more visible, not less. This is a structural regulatory question that no consulting engagement under Value Unlock can resolve.
MAS appears to recognise that the programme alone is insufficient. At the inaugural Chairpersons Guild Forum on March 6, MAS managing director Chia Der Jiun stated that Value Unlock is “about bringing about transformation in corporate practices and concrete outcomes”. He announced MAS is reviewing the Corporate Governance Code to add practical guidance on value creation, specifically on “capital efficiency and whether market valuation adequately reflects the company’s earnings potential”. SGX will consider mandatory disclosures on dividend policy, investor relations policy, and the link between remuneration and value creation. It is now clear that governance code reform and mandatory disclosure obligations are intended to follow the programme’s capability-building phase. The first plank has been laid.
Chia also announced that SGX will hold an investor fair by the end of 2026 or early 2027, providing a dedicated platform for programme participants, including grant recipients, to showcase improvements in corporate governance and long-term value creation. That mechanism, if executed with institutional rigour rather than treated as a showcase event, would constitute precisely the kind of public accountability checkpoint the programme currently lacks at the aggregate level.
What boards must do
Understanding the full scope of what has been committed is the starting point. The published improvement plan and progress disclosures required under the Elevate Grant are not administrative forms. They are public statements that institutional investors will read, track and measure against subsequent results. Boards that treat this as a grant completion exercise risk publishing commitments they cannot deliver. The reputational cost of that gap, before the very investors they are trying to attract, will exceed the benefit of any grant.
For the 196 Value Destroyers earning below cost of equity, capital allocation discipline and returns improvement must precede investor relations strategy. As Amova’s Lai observed, institutional investors distinguish sharply between a value opportunity and a value trap: the differentiator is evidence of fundamental change — in ownership, management, strategy or capital discipline, not better communications. A credibly improved ROE, sustained over two or three reporting cycles, will do more for institutional ownership than any investor day.
The capital structure constraint demands equal candour. For Quality Orphans with effective free float below 15%, institutional access is structurally blocked regardless of how well the investment case is communicated. Controlling shareholders must engage honestly with the free float question. That Indonesia has moved its free float minimum above Singapore’s current standard, under regulatory duress, should serve as a reminder that this is not a question that indefinitely defers itself. Remaining sub-scale and institutionally inaccessible is a corporate decision, not an inevitability.
Above all, investor engagement must become a board-level strategic capability, not a management event calendar. The board should own the investor relations strategy, set the institutional feedback loop and hold management accountable to measurable outcomes, not simply receive a summary investor relations report once a quarter. The distinction between strategic stakeholder stewardship and event scheduling is where most Singapore boards currently fall short.
The verdict
The EQDP deployment window — $3.95 billion (61%) of $6.5 billion allocated, with the remaining $2.55 billion expected around mid-2026 — is finite. As discussed in previous articles, 2025’s market performance — STI up 22.7%; daily turnover rising 21% to $1.5 billion; IPO proceeds of U$2.5 billion, the highest in recent years — was a liquidity-driven event, not a fundamental re-rating. Trading data confirms this: the STI’s share of total market trading value improved from 88% in April 2025 to 77% in September, but reconcentrated to 80% by December — evidence that capital gravitated back to institutional-grade names as deployment constraints tightened, which is precisely the structural limitation that communications training cannot resolve.
Value Unlock is well-targeted at the 103 Quality Orphans that are profitable, fundamentally sound and genuinely overlooked. For this cohort, the programme could be transformative if companies execute on the commitments they publish and service providers deliver institutional-quality capability, not event management. For the broader market, MAS’s signals on governance code reform and mandatory disclosure confirm this was always intended as a first step, not a complete answer.
The question for boards is not whether MAS has done enough. It is whether they are doing enough with the opportunity MAS has created, and whether the answers they publish in their improvement plans reflect genuine intent or the minimum required to close out an application. The window is open. It is also narrowing. Institutional investors, and it now appears the regulator, will be watching closely.
Lee Ooi Keong is an independent director of an SGX Mainboard-listed company with 30 years of experience in corporate performance, investments and risk management. He is the founder and managing director of Clover Point Consultants, an independent Board and C-suite advisory firm, and was formerly director of risk management at Temasek for over 16 years
