After spending more than a decade working in marketing roles for global enterprises, Ms Sophia Ng, 36, decided to leave the corporate world behind.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She was inspired by the way her eight-year-old daughter learned and grew through play, so in 2022 she co-founded Kidztropic, an indoor play space that was aimed at being both fun and educational for children.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“During my younger days, climbing the corporate ladder was very important to me, but after 9 to 10 years, I didn’t need titles to justify my value as a person,” she said.<\/p>\n
Her decision to swap the office for slides and trampolines reflects a larger trend among women, who are keen to strike out on their own.<\/p>\n
The number of women-owned companies in Singapore grew from 16,300 in 2010 to 36,000 in 2022, data from the Department of Statistics showed. This accounts for one in four of all resident-owned companies that year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Their contribution to the economy has also expanded sharply: Female-owned companies accounted for 21.3 per cent of the total revenue of resident-owned companies in 2022 \u2013 up from just 10.3 per cent in 2010.<\/p>\n
Despite their growing presence, however, women-owned businesses are not keeping pace with their male counterparts.<\/p>\n
New data from OCBC found that women-owned small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore experience about 30 per cent lower sales turnover growth in their first three years compared to those owned by men.<\/p>\n
The struggle with early revenue is a struggle that Ms Ng knows all too well. While her startup provides indoor play spaces for children, her entrepreneurial journey thus far has been far from child’s play.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ms Ng’s first outlet at The Poiz Centre faced an unexpected one-month delay in opening, while her second outlet at Annex@Furama was delayed for twice as long.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With their initial revenue projections and operational timelines gone awry, Ms Ng and her co-founder opted to bootstrap their way out of debt, using personal funds to sustain operations.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After spending more than a decade working in marketing roles for global enterprises, Ms Sophia Ng, 36, decided…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":275971,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[64,607,67,132,68,73758],"class_list":{"0":"post-275970","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-entrepreneurship","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us","13":"tag-women-in-business"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115313344754495735","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275970\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}