Competition & Foreign Investment Review

Market-leading antitrust and foreign investment control expertise

Singapore’s classic hub economy combines the world’s busiest transhipment port, the highest density of global Asia-Pacific headquarters and US$150 billion in annual foreign direct investment inflows. The city-state is also the corporate decision-making epicentre and principal investment gateway to ASEAN, the world’s fifth-largest economy with a combined output of US$4 trillion.

Our Competition & Foreign Investment Review Practice is the market leader in Singapore and the region, covering all aspects of antitrust, merger control, consumer protection, and foreign investment control. We guide businesses to effectively navigate legacy and emerging regulatory complexities.

Largest dedicated and integrated team

Consistently recognised by Global Competition Review as Singapore’s leading practice for both competition law and foreign investment control, our ‘Brussels-sized’ team combines specialist lawyers, economists, and former Government officials. It is the region’s largest and most experienced team dedicated exclusively to these specialist disciplines.

Our in-house Competition Economics Team is also unmatched regionally in scale enabling rigorous assessment of competition theories of harm in our legal advice.

Range and depth of experience

We strategically manage competition law and national security screening exposure across Singapore and ASEAN. Our experience encompasses Competition and Consumer Commission Singapore (“CCS”) and Office of Significant Investments Review (“OSIR”) framework regimes, and sectoral frameworks covering telecommunications, media, electricity, gas, and land, sea and air transport. For outbound investments, we quarterback multi-jurisdictional assessments and coordinate international competition and national security filings.

Competition

• International merger control

We have advised on close to 80 per cent. of over 120 mergers publicly reviewed by CCS over two decades, alongside a corresponding volume of confidential call-in reviews, providing comprehensive insight into evolving theories of harm.

Landmark matters include Singapore’s only failing-firm defence clearance (SIA/Tigerair), reversing CCS’s first provisional merger prohibition (Greif/GEP), defending the first merger reviewed jointly by ASEAN regulators (Grab/Uber), and advising on a significant majority of CCS Phase 2 reviews involving novel defences and complex remedies negotiations.

• Global cartel and monopolies defence

We have successfully acted in 100 per cent. of CCS’s global cartel infringement decisions to-date. Our Practice was the chief advisor to the immunity applicant in the freight forwarding case and the leniency applicants in the ball bearings and aluminium electrolytic capacitors cases.

Our Practice has advised on all major CCS monopoly decisions, including defending the pioneering SISTIC ticketing case and securing a successful outcome in the GCR award-winning Coca-Cola fountain-drinks investigation. We also successfully advised an energy licensee in the Energy Market Authority’s first-ever competition hearing under the essential facilities provisions its gas transportation legislation.

• Antitrust litigation

Our Practice is active in competition litigation against the CCS and sectoral regulators, including to appellate antitrust bodies. We successfully represented four corporate appellants in a watershed appeal involving record financial penalties, and secured the Competition Appeal Board’s first-ever reversal of a CCS cartel infringement finding for failure to establish liability.

Foreign investment control and national security

We advise on Singapore’s most complex foreign investment control matters under the new Significant Investments Review Act and all national security sectoral legislation.

Our Practice has acted as lead adviser on a significant majority of mandatory OSIR approvals secured in the Designated Entity space to date. This includes OSIR’s first-ever clearance: Chandra Asri Pacific and Glencore’s joint venture acquisition of Shell’s Singapore energy and chemicals parks business, completed in April 2025.

We also comprehensively manage residual national security risks in transaction structuring, regulatory engagement, risk mitigation and post-completion implementation across all sectors. Our Partners are renowned experts in the statutory concept of national security in the Singapore context.

Digital markets and consumer protection regulation

We advise on all aspects of CCS’s expanded remit and associated powers following its assumption of consumer product safety and legal metrology responsibilities under the Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act and related legislation on 1 July 2025.

Our Practice is active in advising and defending corporates under the CCS’s evolving AI and digital-market regulation. Capabilities cover dark patterns, platform architecture, algorithmic pricing and collusion, self-preferencing, interoperability, data portability, platform lock-in, drip pricing, subscription traps and cancellation barriers.

As competition and consumer protection scrutiny converge in Singapore and the region across all business ecosystems, we are your go-to advisers for effective regulatory compliance, deal navigation, and corporate strategy realisation.