Temasek Brand Guidelines: Singapore’s 1974 State Investor and Its Yearly Temasek Review

A company formed to hold what the state already owned.

Temasek Holdings was incorporated in Singapore on 25 June 1974 under the Companies Act, English Wikipedia says, to hold and manage assets that the government had until then owned directly. The idea was that the companies would be owned and run on a commercial basis, leaving the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Trade and Industry free to concentrate on policy. The company takes its name from Temasek, an early settlement on the island.

Those assets had gathered in the decade after independence in August 1965. Wikipedia names among the companies the state owned or set up in those years Keppel, which began as a shipyard taken over from the Royal Navy, the shipping line Neptune Orient Lines, and the airline business that became Singapore Airlines. Its first portfolio, Wikipedia says, held shares in a bird park, a hotel, a shoemaker, a detergent maker, naval yards turned into a ship-repair business, a start-up airline and an iron and steel mill.

Its legal status is unusual. Temasek is a company whose single shareholder is the Minister for Finance. It is also designated a Fifth Schedule entity under the Constitution of Singapore, English Wikipedia explains: safeguards protect past reserves, so the President’s approval is needed for any transaction likely to draw them down, and the President can appoint, renew or remove members of its board. In most other respects it works as a commercial investment company. It pays tax in the countries where it operates, pays dividends to its one shareholder, and has its own board and management team.

That is why Wikipedia notes that Temasek, though often counted as a sovereign wealth fund, differs from a classic one: it invests mostly in equities and owns many companies outright. Its leadership has changed twice in recent years. On 1 October 2021 Dilhan Pillay Sandrasegara succeeded Ho Ching as executive director and chief executive, and on 9 October 2025 Teo Chee Hean became chairman, succeeding Lim Boon Heng, as Wikipedia and Mothership record.

A yearly review and a portfolio built over five decades.

Temasek’s financial year ends on 31 March, and each July it reports in the Temasek Review. The 2026 edition was released on 8 July 2026, Mothership reported. It reported a higher net portfolio value than a year earlier, roughly double the figure of a decade before. Twenty-year total shareholder return stood at 6.8 per cent and ten-year at 7.1 per cent, while the five-year figure, 4.6 per cent, had been held back by China’s capital markets from 2021 to 2024, according to the same report.

The Review groups the portfolio into three segments: Singapore-based Temasek portfolio companies, global direct investments, and partnerships, funds and asset-management companies. In 2026 Temasek said artificial-intelligence-related holdings made up 6 per cent of portfolio value and that it aimed to raise that to as much as 15 per cent by 2031; it named AI, core-plus infrastructure and private credit as the areas where it saw near-term opportunities, Mothership reported.

Disclosure is part of how the company presents itself. Wikipedia records that Temasek has held overall credit ratings of Aaa from Moody’s and AAA from Standard & Poor’s since its first ratings in 2004, and that in a 2009 speech Ho Ching said it published its financial information in an annual report although, as a private company, it was not legally obliged to.

Wikipedia’s account of its holdings shows how wide the portfolio runs. At home, by the end of its 2015 financial year it held a 51 per cent stake in Singtel; it wholly owns the property group Mapletree Investments and the consultancy Surbana Jurong, formed by a merger in 2015; in 2015 it set up Mandai Park Holdings, which oversees Singapore’s nature and wildlife parks; and it took a 52 per cent stake in CapitaLand Investment when that business was spun off in 2021. Abroad, Wikipedia lists a 30 per cent stake in the Danish engineering firm Haldor Topsoe bought in March 2019, and the purchase of Element Materials Technology from Bridgepoint in January 2022, in which it already held a minority stake. In November 2022, after the crypto exchange FTX collapsed, Temasek wrote its investment down to zero, Wikipedia records.

How state investors present themselves.

Sovereign wealth funds and large public pension investors rarely advertise. They manage money for governments or for pension members rather than for retail customers, and their public identity is built mostly from documents: annual reports, responsible-investment reports, governance pages and press releases about individual deals. Norway’s oil fund publishes a year-by-year timeline of its own growth; Singapore’s GIC publishes a report each July with its 20-year returns, while explaining on its website why it does not disclose the size of its assets.

Their websites tend to be restrained. They lead with a mandate — preserving national wealth, paying pensions, investing for future generations — and support it with portfolio overviews, lists of holdings, leadership pages and statements of values. Several also publish stewardship material: how they vote at company meetings, how they engage with boards, and which companies they have excluded or placed under observation, and why. NBIM’s exclusion list, which gives a criterion and a date for each company, is one example.

Their physical presence is usually a handful of offices in financial districts rather than shops or products. NBIM lists offices in Oslo, London, New York and Singapore; English Wikipedia describes GIC’s network of 11 offices in financial capitals. What the public sees of them is mostly a name or a set of initials, a limited palette, and pages of text and charts.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each institution — when it was founded, who owns it, what it is mandated to do and how it presents itself — using dated sources and the institutions’ own words, attributed as such. Occasionally one steps outside that register, as GIC did in October 2026 with The Secret Vault, a public exhibition marking its 45th anniversary.

Three entities, one name.

The company reorganised in 2026. On 28 August 2025 Temasek announced that it would create three wholly owned entities from 1 April 2026: Temasek Global Investments, Temasek Singapore and Temasek Partnership Solutions, with Temasek International housing group and corporate functions, according to Wikipedia. Mothership reported in July 2026 that the new structure had been in place since 1 April and was meant to give each entity a clearer focus, and that the firm said it would continue to operate together as “OneTemasek.”

Wikipedia says the company is headquartered in Singapore with 13 offices in nine countries, among them London, New York, Paris, Beijing, Mumbai and Mexico City. Commenting on the 2026 results, its chairman said the team would act so as to “do well, do right, do good,” always acting today with tomorrow in mind, Mothership reported.

For a design guide, Temasek shows how a state-owned investor builds its public identity around a single yearly report and a short statement of purpose rather than products. Compare GIC, Singapore’s other state investor, and Singapore Exchange, the city’s stock exchange. For this guide we use a deep teal, warm sand and a laterite red with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Temasek’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.