Stealing Cupid’s Bow

The dating industry worldwide isn’t new, neither is the scene in Singapore. Mr Ong Peng Tsin is one of those Singapore entrepreneurs who has made a mark in the dating industry when he founded Match.com in 1994. It is now owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, a media conglomerate.

To date, there are about 200 dating and matchmaking agencies here in Singapore, and, according to Singapore’s Dating Industry Market Survey 2006, about 70% of them were established less than five years ago.

Why the boom?

With Singapore’s declining birth rate being a great national concern (it was 1.92 in 1990, 1.48 in 1999 and 1.24 in 2007), the government has doubled up its efforts to promote dating, marriage and babies. We have a government matchmaking organization (Social Development Unit), a nation-wide Romancing Singapore campaign, government grants for dating and matchmaking agencies (Partner Connection Fund) and now a formal accreditation process and designation in the SDU Trust Mark.

The dating industry is heavily supported and subsidized in Singapore, paving the way for enterprising individuals to capitalize on government resources.

(1) Partnerships: Setting up a formal organization like the SDU or running a campaign like Romancing Singapore requires many little cogs in the wheel for them to be useful to Singaporeans. If you’re a company that serves some of those many needs, you will have a ready partner in the government.

(2) Free marketing: You don’t need to have huge marketing dollars since you can ride on the government’s. Necessarily and too obviously, the government’s marketing efforts for their initiatives will span the right target segments nationally. Collaboration will enable you to not only gain you new customers, but also additional targeted reach.

(3) Funding: With the Partner Connection Fund, dating and matchmaking agencies can get some of their expenses reimbursed. This subsidizes their running costs and gives new entrants into the dating industry more runway.

Market size

In 2007, 19% of the resident male population aged 35-39 were single, while the number was 15.5% for females. For the slightly younger crowd of those aged 30-34, 35% of males and 22% of females remain single.

Out of a resident population of 3.6m (the Singapore Department of Statistics surveys the resident and not total population), there are about 300,000 males between aged 30-39, likewise for females. Taking a simple average of 27% single males, and 17% single females, this brings us to a market size of resident singles aged 30-39 in Singapore to be 81,000 males and 51,000 females – a total of 132,000. A pretty sizeable number.

But we must remember that a lot of the dating and matchmaking agencies in Singapore are also beginning to target the younger crowd. Especially with the increasing inroads into online dating, a segment that usually attracts singles who are in the 20+ age range. This expands the Singapore’s dating industry’s total market size.

The early years