Actually, this is true for anywhere in the world right now, even here in Singapore itself. Verbatim itself has stopped making SL discs in the local plant. The only reason I can still get hold of these discs now is customer ignorance : nobody seems to know that these discs are any good, so they tend to ignore them. Also, they aren't that cheap. The 4x discs above cost nearly as much as MIT 8x Verbatim discs.
Paradoxically, the 8x MIT discs available here are quite inconsistent in quality. They come in Asia Pacific specific packaging and give strange results when burned on various burners by various people (much higher than normal PIE levels in general, huge PIE peaks at the start and ends of discs, leading to odd "bikini" shaped PIE graphs, failure to burn faster than 4x and coasters at 8x).
Labour wages here are apparently nearly as high as in the US. That pretty much explains why the local Verbatim factory doesn't expand its manufacturing capacity to meet customer demand. So instead, the factory here gets used to manufacture cutting edge stuff. As I understand it, right now it is only DL discs that get made there but the factory will be making all of Verbatim's HD-DVD discs as well.
