And everybody would walk out onto this viewing platform and the tiger would be approaching a baited live goat,” which you could do in those days, you can’t do it now. They bait this live goat steak came out every night, different one every night. A tiger would come in… Read More
Yeah, sure. Okay, so one day I’m sitting at my desk and I get a call from the chief water engineer of the Public Utilities Board. And he says, “So what are you doing with that extra land?” Zoo is 28 hectares with the car parks and quarantines and stuff. Read More
He said, we need to come up with an idea. Read More
So we had a series of lunches every week with captains of industry and asked them, so if you have 60 hectares of forested land, what would you do?… Read More
Was some of your money, though, coming from literally private industry?… Read More
Yes. Companies that we give money to the zoo. Yes, yeah, we would make a few million dollars a year on adoptions and outright capital donations. Singapore is a very affluent country. Well, let’s talk about another area. During this time in 1988, public utility board comes to you, wants… Read More
Can you talk about that process?… Read More
Can you help us to make up the deficit?… Read More
We got quite a lot of development projects that we need to put in. Can you help us?” As a government, they have many ways of transferring money to different government departments. So we latched in on a government department way of getting money. At one stage, we were getting… Read More
So if you insist on subsidizing all the visitors coming to the zoo, then spend it all on operations or else raise your damn prices and make yourself financially viable. And then you could spend all that money on capital development.” And we had always been very socialistic in our… Read More
So it was a dual partnership, public-private?… Read More
Yeah, you could say that. I think the government felt that in the case of the zoo, they were a little less strict than with the other government companies. So Singapore Airlines is a government-owned company. Singapore Airlines normally would never get any handouts from the government, although during COVID,… Read More
Where did the Singapore Zoo sit in the hierarchy of city government?… Read More
Up to the side part of it?… Read More
Yeah, very, very much to the side. We weren’t treated as civil servants, but we were treated as quasi-government. So as a government company, you have certain, I wouldn’t say privileges, but Temasek Holdings, the holding company, invites you to various seminars and things that say private sector wouldn’t be… Read More
What signs told you you were getting successful and was it hard to keep that momentum?… Read More
Well, we started to see the results with the increased tourist attendance. So as I said, when we opened, it was 800,000. We dropped to 500,000. We plateaued at 500,000 a year. Breakfast at the zoo kicks in. And then over the next three to five years, our tourist attendant… Read More
And so that’s what we stuck with until we opened Night Safari. And then Night Safari cannibalized some of the tourists, but at the same time, it wasn’t so dramatic. And so it attracted its own set of tourists. I read about a million visitors a year. Read More
Sometimes they were old exhibits that we totally renovated. But we started off, I think the first exhibit that we started off was Cuban Islands. And then we went on to sea lions and every year something reptile garden. Yeah. Read More
When did you know or when did you start to think that your marketing ideas?… Read More