In the early days of Covid-19, as the pandemic slowly became a reality, Singaporeans began lining up not just for toilet paper and hand sanitiser but also for face masks. As a result, many profiteers began reselling boxes of face masks online at five times the price, many of which were purchased from Singapore-based healthcare and pharmaceutical company Pasture Holdings.
Frustrated by the profiteering he witnessed, Pasture Holdings founder and CEO Lloyd Soong recalls thinking, “There has to be a better way.” Soong imposed purchase limits and rerouted two container loads of N95s — meant initially for overseas clients — back to Singapore for local use.
When confronted with the opportunism of scalpers, his response was to ensure Singaporeans could access supplies, even donating face masks to nursing homes that had no budget to buy them. This episode thrust Pasture Holdings into the public eye in 2020, earning it considerable attention as a crucial early private-sector source of N95 masks in Singapore, filling a vital supply gap before centralised distribution took over.
