A total of 8.94 million visitors arrived in Singapore in 2005, exceeding the Singapore Tourism Board's (STB) target of 8.9 million and posting an increase of 7 percent over 2004, according to the figures released by the STB Wednesday.

The STB attributed the robust performance to double-digit growth in visitor arrivals from markets such as Vietnam, the Philippines and India, which rose by 42 percent, 30 percent and 24 percent respectively.

Of the total, 1.8 million visitors came from Indonesia, the highest number among all markets, and 858,000 visitors from China last year.

These two countries, together with Australia, Japan and India, were Singapore's top five visitor-generating markets for 2005, which accounted for about half of the total visitor arrivals.

According to STB, it is for the first time that India ranked as one of the city state's top five markets.

Hotels in Singapore registered 1.1 billion Singapore dollars (US$673.7 million) in room revenue in the first 11 months of last year, up 15 percent in comparison with the corresponding period of 2004.

Tourism receipts in 2005 surpassed STB's target of 10.4 billion Singapore dollars (US$6.4 billion) to reach 10.8 billion Singapore dollars (US$6.6 billion), up 10 percent year on year, according to the STB.

(Xinhua News Agency January 20, 2006)