By AMIT ROY CHOUDHURY

COMING soon - from the people who came up with your library book drops and your taxi call system - a way to make your buses run on less fuel.

So vast is the reach of ST Engineering and so pervasive its technology that it touches you in ways that you don't even realise.

When you borrow a book from the National Library and drop it off at any branch day or night, you have this company to thank, for the system processes it, all within seconds.

Ditto, when you call a taxi and the operator pinpoints your location and directs the nearest cab to you, all within minutes.

This holds true, too, when you take the MRT and the doors of both the train and the platform open for you to alight, all in perfect synchronicity.

All these daily conveniences you take for granted, and more, are thanks to one man, and the team he oversees at ST Engineering.

And now, Fong Saik Hay, chief technology officer, will see to it that these homegrown technologies make an impact on the rest of the world.

Mr Fong's team is working on a transmission system of sorts that will help heavy vehicles have substantial fuel savings of more than 10 per cent. This includes the bus you take to work every day and the dumper truck that collects your garbage.

While the end product remains the raison d'etre, Mr Fong highlighted how critical it is to give latitude for the development of a new technology. In the case of the fuel saving system, it was a gruelling process that started when they first backed a company in the 1990s.

'We gave them some money to test bed. One of two attempts were not so successful, but they improved over time and now, I think we would be world leader in the area of highly efficient hydraulic transmission systems for heavy vehicles,' he said.

Who would have thought all this started out as merely as a tool to service equipment for the armed forces?

'When the armed forces were set up, they started small companies to serve different aspects of their needs,' said Mr Fong. He said that Goh Keng Swee, Singapore's first deputy prime minister, set up several companies so that Singapore would develop the necessary expertise to service, overhaul and make improvements to defence equipment.

Perhaps what made all the difference was the fact that Mr Goh set up the companies as commercial entities, rather than state-owned behemoths.

'So making money and being profitable have always been in our psyche, while at the same time we have supported Singapore's defence needs,' Mr Fong said.

From a loose agglomeration of some companies, the consolidated ST Engineering is now a global network of over 100 subsidiaries and associated companies in 24 countries and 42 cities, with over 20,000 employees.

The company, set up in 1997, recorded $5.35 billion in revenues in fiscal 2008 with profits of $541 million. Around 42 per cent of revenues came from outside Asia and commercial sales accounted for 66 per cent of total revenues in fiscal 2008.

The CTO, however, noted that even though ST Engineering is a technology company, its driving force is not technology for technology's sake.

This ethos has often caused friction between the company and research institutions with new innovations to hock.

'We don't take it because we think it's not (yet) ready for marketing or is not in our marketing space,' Mr Fong noted.

'We don't let technology drive our business. We look at what the customer wants and needs and then we look at what technology will support this need,' he said.

And this approach has seen the successful development of a whole spectrum of useful technologies.

But ST Technologies isn't content to focus merely on new gadgets; it is now fostering a holistic approach to innovation.

'We are looking to use our expertise and technologies to provide solutions and not just pieces of hardware. Take for example our intelligent transportation systems. We can now go to a country and say that we can put an intelligent transportation system for you and this ability that we have has come from different aspects of our knowledge.'

To that end, under his aegis, the company now devotes an average of 3 per cent of its turnover specifically for research and development.

So what's next? According to Mr Fong, besides the company's continuous innovations in military and communications, the public can look forward to ST Engineering-led leaps in green technology and education.

This article was first published in The Business Times.