Barely a week later, Yeo Hiap Seng, the maker of Yeo’s beverages, said that it would consolidate its can manufacturing to Malaysia, laying off 25 employees in the process.  Established in Singapore in 1938, Yeo’s first made its name in the domestic market through its soy sauce, and in the 1950s, it diversified into other products such as canned curry chicken, bottled soy milk and other Asian drinks.  The announcements by two Singapore icons made back-to-back led some people to wonder: “Which Singapore brand is next?”  Dr Samer Elhajjar, senior lecturer from the department of marketing at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School, said that this discomfort is a rational response. “Brands are part of national memory and industrial identity. When an iconic brand stops producing locally, people are not only mourning a beverage or a can line.  “They are reacting to the sense that another piece of everyday nationhood has become more abstract,” he added. “In small states especially, brands often carry outsized symbolic weight because they are among the few globally …