President Salvador Illa gave a lecture this morning at the Singapore Business Federation (SBF), the chamber of commerce and the main business organization in the country, as part of the institutional tour of Southeast Asia. From that forum, he warned about the “fear speeches towards the different” heard in Catalonia, referring to the far right, and contrasted them with the ethnic and religious diversity prevailing in Singapore.
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For Illa, Singapore is an example of what a small state can represent in the world economically and also socially. “It is a diverse country, ethnically plural and with different religions, and that does not make them weak, it makes them strong,” said the president at the business conference.
In a speech delivered entirely in English, the president resorted to Catalan to explain the meaning of his words, although he avoided mentioning Aliança Catalana or Vox. “I say this because of all those messages of fear of the different that we live with in our home,” he said, before concluding that “diversity is a source of wealth.”
“A small country can make itself heard,” says Illa referring to Singapore
The comparisons between Catalonia and Singapore did not end there. The president emphasized that the size of a territory does not determine its capacity for influence and used the Asian country as an example. “You don’t have to be big to be influential. Singapore has six million inhabitants and Catalonia, eight. Just as a small country can make itself heard in the world if it has ambition, Catalonia can also do so,” he said.
At this point, he assured that one of the pillars on which Catalonia is projecting its future is infrastructure such as the port – “one of the main logistical nodes of the Mediterranean and a privileged gateway to European markets” – or the airport. About El Prat, he said that “it faces a decisive expansion to become an intercontinental connectivity node.”
In addition to these infrastructures, Illa also highlighted before a group of businessmen, with whom he later dialogued, that the Catalan economy grew by 2.7% in 2025, above the European average. He also pointed out that the Zona Franca, Fira Barcelona are two other assets that exemplify Catalonia’s capacity to attract investment, industry, and technology.
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Regarding the projects that Catalonia leads to position itself as a hub of innovation and investment, Illa mentioned the Supercomputing Center, the candidacy to host the gigafactory, the Innovation Trident strategy that aims to turn Catalonia into a European hub for the semiconductor industry, Catalunya Media City, or the health and biomedicine cluster of l’Hospitalet de Llobregat.
Implicit reference in his speech to the end of the “procés”
The idea that Catalonia is once again a “safe bet” for investment was present throughout the president’s intervention. Illa used that expression up to six times to convey the message to Singapore’s business community that Catalonia has regained institutional stability and legal security after “years of paralysis,” an implicit reference to the “procés” period.
“We have opened a new chapter,” he concluded, arguing that the country now offers a scenario of predictability and confidence to attract investments.
Six days of travel, five “high-level” meetings, and two agreements
The president of the Generalitat concludes today his institutional tour of Vietnam and Singapore. Six days in which he has held 54 meetings, five of them institutional and of “top level,” as Illa himself explained at the business forum conference. He also mentioned that two agreements have been reached that will be developed in the coming months.
In fact, in these six days “we have sown, it is about opening up to the world,” the president said about the fruits of this trip to Southeast Asia, which is part of the Asia strategy promoted by the Government. The tour concludes today with a meeting with the CEO of Singapore Airlines, which this year commemorates 20 years of presence in Barcelona, a meeting with leaders of one of Asia’s main technology groups in engineering and defense, the company ST Engineering and ST Ventures. Finally, he will visit the Catalan company Eurofragance, specialized in the creation and production of fragrances. This company has had a subsidiary in Singapore since 2013.
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