Lee Yi Shyan

Minister of State for Trade & Industry

Date of Birth: 1962

Singapore is making a renewed effort to boost its African trade. It falls to the Minister of Trade and Industry (MTI), Lee Yi Shyan, to make that happen. In July, the Minister presided over the first Africa-Singapore Business Forum, attended by emissaries from 17 African countries.

The Forum concluded with the creation of the Africa Business Group, tasked with doubling Singaporean investment in Africa in five years. Shabbir Hassanbhai, Singapore's High Commissioner to Nigeria, now chairs the ABG. Though tiny compared with China's and India's, Singapore's African trade is the largest of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations members, at US$7.9 bn. in 2009.

Born in 1962, Lee earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering at the National University of Singapore. He has also pursued management studies at Harvard Business School and at Tsinghua University, China. His rise mirrors that of others in the city-state's elite. After working for a few years as a systems engineer at the Ministry of Defence, he joined the MTI's Economic Development Board, which posted him in the United States and China.

In 2000, he moved to the Productivity and Standards Board, another MTI agency that assists small- and medium-sized enterprises. The following year, he took the reigns of International Enterprise Singapore, the foreign trade promotion board. Lee has held his current position since 2006, when he won a parliamentary seat from the East Coast Group Representation Constituency as a member of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's People's Action Party. In 2009, he added the Ministry of Manpower to his portfolio.