The Morning FounderSoutheast Asian business history, daily

HeritageSingapore3 min read

Every Number Went Up Except The One Holding Up The Power Rail

Watercolour illustration for Every Number Went Up Except The One Holding Up The Power Rail
Watercolour · The Morning Founder

Every number the eye could see went up — profit almost tripled, the stations became malls. The one nobody watched was maintenance spend per train-kilometre, flat since 2003 while the system strained. Both bills came due in the same 36 hours.

Singapore has shopping malls inside its MRT stations.

I never thought about who decided that.

Here's what I didn't know until recently:

She was a duty-free executive, and she got the job by answering a newspaper ad.

Saw Phaik Hwa spent nineteen years at DFS Venture Singapore. Perfume, liquor, tourist flows. In early 2002, DFS retrenched her in budget cuts.

Then she saw SMRT advertising for a chief executive in The Straits Times. She applied. She got it.

A railway sees a station as a place people pass through. A retailer sees a crowd standing still.

She rebuilt them as shops.

Raffles Xchange opened in February 2005. Commercial space went from 23,000 square metres to 34,400.

It worked. Net profit went from S$56.8 million in 2002 to S$161.1 million in 2011. By September 2011 the trains carried 1.79 million rides a day.

Here's what the P&L never showed.

The Committee of Inquiry later found SMRT's repair and maintenance spend per train-kilometre had "remained fairly constant since 2003." Nothing was slashed. It was held flat while everything around it grew.

Metal claws hold up the rail that carries the power to the trains.

On 15 December 2011, just before 7pm, one let go.

A fastener failed. Six more claws dropped. A section of live rail collapsed. Four trains went dead in the tunnels.

Five hours. Eleven stations. 127,000 commuters.

A woman fainted in the heat. A 31-year-old insurance agent smashed a window with a fire extinguisher so his sick wife could breathe.

Saturday morning it happened again. Seven hours, 94,000 more people. PM Lee announced a public inquiry that afternoon.

She resigned on 6 January 2012.

She had a case, and she made it. SMRT testified that maintenance spending rose about 10% a year from 2009. She had added, in her words, "a thousand over trips on trains per week." The inquiry faulted the regulator too — LTA had known about dropping claws since 1995.

Her chairman said she had raised leaving with him on 7 December. Eight days before the first breakdown.

The Committee found both breakdowns preventable. It described "a gaping disconnect between what was formally on record and what was happening on the ground." No published finding names her.

Her own summary: "My nine years is not just about two days."

Here's what keeps coming back to me:

Every number anyone could see went up. Profit. Ridership. Retail space.

The one nobody watched was maintenance spend per train-kilometre. Flat since 2003.

Both compounded the whole time. Both bills came due in the same 36 hours.

A P&L is a list of things somebody chose to count. The thing that ends you is usually the one that shows up only on the day it fails.

SMRT replaced all 30,000 claws that year and put S$900 million into asset renewal.

What's the number in your business that nobody reports until it breaks?

This is the LinkedIn edit — written to fit inside 3,000 characters.

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