The Edge Singapore had contacted SPH Media on Oct 28 for comment about the rumoured layoffs.

SPH Media will let go of 34 staff — 10% of its employees in its tech division — citing a need to cut costs after tech expenditure rose to nearly a fifth of the company’s annual expenses. 

Chief operating officer Loh Yuh Yiing and chief technology officer Kaythaya Maw announced the layoffs in a note to SPH Media staff on Nov 4, reported The Business Times and Lianhe Zaobao, two of the daily papers in SPH Media’s stable. 

According to the two chiefs, SPH Media had to “urgently and aggressively” hire tech staff following its restructuring in December 2021. “This ramp-up was needed to catalyse and power the earlier phase of transformation. But we recognise that it is not a level that we can afford to sustain beyond 2024.”

Loh and Maw add that there are “currently no plans” for further retrenchment exercises “of this nature” at SPH Media.

The Edge Singapore had contacted SPH Media on Oct 28 for comment about the rumoured layoffs, and SPH Media provided a written response claiming there has been “no such exercise” since the start of 2024. 

Various tech firms have retrenched staff here this year, as the frenzied hiring for tech capacity dissipated. On Jan 3, The Edge Singapore broke the news of shock layoffs by e-commerce platform operator Lazada in Singapore and the region. Local staff were also retrenched from Amazon, Google, Unity and Carousell in the following months. In October, global tech giants Dyson and Samsung laid off an undisclosed number of employees globally — Singapore included. 

Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) was listed on the Mainboard of the Singapore Exchange S68 from 1984 to 2021. SPH was dropped from the bellwether Straits Times Index in June 2020, and management announced a major restructuring in May 2021 to hive off the media-related business to become a public company limited by guarantee, receiving funding from the government. 

In March, Singapore’s Ministry of Communications and Information said it budgeted to provide SPH Media with around $260 million in funding in the ongoing FY2024.

SPH was delisted in May 2022 following its acquisition by Cuscaden Peak, a consortium made up of Hotel Properties H15 Limited, Mapletree Investments, and CLA Real Estate. The latter is an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek.

SPH Media runs a list of titles here, including The Straits Times, The Business Times and Lianhe Zaobao.