Singapore's CapitaLand Investment launches first onshore master fund in China
May 21 (Reuters) - Real estate investment manager CapitaLand Investment Ltd (CAPN.SI), opens new tab said on Wednesday that it has launched its first onshore master fund in China, backed by a total equity commitment of 5 billion yuan ($692.58 million).
The Singapore-based company said its new fund, CLI RMB Master Fund, will target business parks, retail, rental housing, and serviced residences, with a majority stake to be held by a local insurance company.
"This (the fund) allows us to tap into a rising trend of insurance companies increasing their capital allocation to real estate in China," said Puah Tze Shyang, chief executive officer, CapitaLand Investment China, adding that it will provide opportunities to invest in a diversified and resilient portfolio of stabilised assets with core returns.
The company expects the CLI RMB Master Fund to add 20 billion yuan to its funds under management once fully deployed.
($1 = 7.2194 Chinese yuan)
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Telegraph
4 hours ago
- Telegraph
Miliband is wasting billions on the wrong nuclear technology
Ed Miliband first succumbed to his idée fixe on Sizewell C in 2009 and that is the problem. The concept is sixteen years out of date. The technological and commercial case for European pressurised reactors (EPR) has been diminishing ever since. It is not a question of whether you are for or against nuclear, or for or against renewables. That culture war absolutism does no favours to the nation. Nuclear technology is in a state of creative revolutionary ferment in America and China. Sizewell C is a throwback to another age. It is a very expensive refinement of 20th-century fission – Gen III in the jargon – with layer after layer of protective barriers, able to withstand an earthquake, a tsunami, a head-on crash by an A380, or a meltdown of the core. You pay to make this old technology super-safe. The International Energy Agency says the capital cost of Hinkley Point, the sister EPR plant to Sizewell C, works out at $16,000 (£12,000) per kilowatt (kW) of gross capacity, compared to $2,700 kW for the simpler Saeul 1 and 2 reactors in Korea. There are hidden subsidies in the Korean figures, but the gap is astonishing. By the time Sizewell C delivers its first watt to the grid in the late 2030s – or 2040 more likely – the world will already be humming with small modular reactors (SMRs) that can made in factories like Nissan Micras, shipped in parts by road and rail, and rolled out in a third of the time. Bill Gates started building his advanced SMR in Wyoming a year ago. If that does not make you stop and pause, it ought to. His TerraPower Gen IV Natrium plant is radically different from old light-water reactors. It is a pocket-sized 350 megawatt (MW) sodium-cooled reactor coupled with molten salt storage. It can ramp up to 500 MW when needed. It dovetails with a modern flexible decentralised grid. The project is built on the site of a coal-powered plant, which means that cables, roads and an eager workforce are all in place. That slashes the cost by 30pc and takes years off the development time. TerraPower originally hoped to supply dispatchable zero-carbon power at $50-$60 per megawatt hour (MWh). Inflation will have pushed up the cost but it is still likely to be a lot lower than Hinkley Point at a strike price of $178 (in today's money). The company is eyeing the UK market. I am willing to bet that TerraPower or something like it will be generating electricity for British data centres or industrial hubs years before Sizewell C fires up – if it ever gets that far, which I question. Or there is X-energy, co-owned by Amazon and able to tap the capital markets for near unlimited sums. It has applied to build its 80 MW, helium-cooled mini-reactors in Texas to supply Dow's petrochemical campus. Unlike the Hinkley-Sizewell reactors, its SMR generates both electricity and 'high-quality heat' (750 degrees) that can be used for heavy industries. It can flex up and down, does not need a vast containment dome and requires no refuelling halts. If not these two, it could be one of the 80 or so different SMR technologies in the global nuclear race, several funded by tech billionaires. Labour has selected the Rolls-Royce design for Britain's first batch of SMRs. They will supply the grid. I heartily applaud. It is home-grown technology and will have 80pc domestic content. It supports a defence company that is critical for UK rearmament and nuclear submarines. What worries me is that a) it is a small version of a standard light-water reactor, and b) the target date has slipped to the mid-2030s. If we are going to press ahead with an older Gen III technology, we had better get a move on. Great British Nuclear has ordered three of the 470 MW reactors; a good signal, yes, but too few to turbo-charge development and pull forward delivery. 'It is not enough to stand up commercial operations,' said the company's Dan Gould. Rolls-Royce is in SMR talks with the Czech Republic, Sweden, Poland and a host of other countries, as well as with a private energy group in the Netherlands. Nothing is yet firm. Mr Miliband would have done better with our money to order 10 or 12 Rolls-Royce reactors. That would have reached critical mass and crowded in hesitant buyers. Instead, Labour is committing a further £14.2bn to Sizewell C and blowing smoke in our eyes with its 'regulated asset base model'. 'They are not telling us how much this is going to cost. They are hiding behind the RAB model,' said Michael Liebreich, founder of BNEF. I would be more forgiving if the Government had not botched the 3.8 gigawatt (GW) Xlinks project, which has money lined up, requires no taxpayer subsidy and is offering to start supplying the UK with baseload power from southern Morocco by 2030. The plan combines Sahara solar power with desert winds that kick up every evening (a convection effect), generating electricity all year round. It would be transmitted to Cornwall via the world's longest cables. All that Xlinks needs is a standard contract for difference of circa £75 MWh and it can start building. Labour has sat on it. Nuclear fusion is further away than SMRs but it is no longer science fiction. High-temperature superconductors have suddenly made it possible to build a fusion plant 40 times smaller than once was the case. This radically changes the economics of fusing hydrogen isotopes to make power, either by squeezing super hot plasma inside a tokamak with magnets, or by inertial fusion with lasers. It has unlocked a torrent of investment funding. Britain is a world-class player in the field, the legacy of the Joint European Torus project at Culham. Mr Miliband did well to secure another £2.5bn to keep this country in the fusion race, funding both the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (Step) in Nottingham and the wider fusion ecosystem around Oxford. Britain should have valuable niches breeding tritium fuel and making superconducting magnets for the world market. Fusion ticks every box. It provides clean, constant baseload power. It creates almost no long-term waste. It is so safe that it can be regulated like a hospital. It uses almost no land and little water. I have no idea what it will cost but Bob Mumgaard, the head of America's Commonwealth Fusion Systems, told me that he was aiming for $80 MWh at his first plant in Virginia in the early 2030s. I have heard similar figures from other fusion companies. Where does Sizewell C fit in this new nuclear order? We know the track record of EPR reactors. The Flamanville project in France was 12 years late and six times over budget. The French Cour des Comptes says the final tally was €19.1bn (£16.3bn), calling it an 'operational failure', undertaken with hubris. Perhaps Flamanville was unlucky. The concrete pillars were 'pockmarked with holes'. Nobody noticed for nine months that the steel reactor vessel had unsafe levels of carbon content. We were told that lessons had been learnt, both there and at Olkiluoto in Finland. The next in the EPR series, at Hinkley Point, would be faster and cheaper. Dream on. I am not against bold industrial ventures. They lift the national spirit. Defenders say the costs of Hinkley and Sizewell are much lower than the nosebleed headline figures once you stretch the lifetime to 60 or 80 years. Realists say we need a large enough nuclear power industry to sustain our military nuclear deterrent. I get all that. But locking the country into yesterday's technology as far out as the 22nd century is a fateful step. It will not cut energy bills – ceteris paribus – and is not needed to tackle green intermittency. We can rely on cheaper gas peaker plants to buttress renewables for a few more years until SMRs, fusion and new fission come of age. Let me make a wager. Sizewell C will not survive real scrutiny or the next austerity crisis. It has HS2 written all over it.
Reuters
4 hours ago
- Reuters
Air India disaster deals heavy blow to 'world class airline' ambition
NEW DELHI, June 12 (Reuters) - The Air India plane crash in which more than 200 passengers were killed on Thursday has plunged the airline into its deepest crisis yet and will deal a heavy blow to its efforts to revamp its reputation and fleet. After taking the carrier over from the government in 2022, the Tata Group unveiled ambitious plans to reverse years of underinvestment in an ageing and outdated fleet and create a "world class airline", as CEO Campbell Wilson has repeatedly put it, on a par with rivals like Emirates. The turnaround has been aimed at tackling its myriad problems including persistent flight delays, disgruntled customers, a shortage of spare parts, delayed plane deliveries and years of financial losses. "Newer aircraft and better maintenance should be the hallmark for Air India to survive. Proper maintenance is what they should be looking into, because Air India has had a chequered past," said Vibhuti Deora, a former legal expert at India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau. That past includes, while under government ownership, Boeing 737 flight from Dubai overshooting the runway at one domestic airport and crashing into a gorge in 2010, killing 158 people. More recently, its low-cost unit Air India Express saw one craft skid off a runway in India in 2020, killing 21 people. Only a few days ago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told an international gathering of hundreds of airline executives in New Delhi that the country's aviation industry stood at a crucial point of takeoff. On Thursday, however, Air India swapped the bright red colour scheme and logo on its website for a more sombre black and grey one, covering it with a banner that carried the crashed flight's number: "AI-171". "For an airline, the most important thing is the brand's identity with safety. This will be a major setback for the brand in that aspect," said Dilip Cherian, a communications consultant and co-founder of public relations firm Perfect Relations. With its maharajah mascot, Air India was once renowned for its lavishly decorated planes and stellar service championed by its founder, JRD Tata, India's first commercial pilot. But since the mid-2000s, the carrier's reputation has worsened as financial troubles mounted. It has flown widebody planes with business class seats in poor condition and grounded some of its new Boeing (BA.N), opens new tab 787 Dreamliners for lack of spare parts. When Tata regained control, the airline was "just in absolute shambles", its CEO Wilson told Reuters in a 2024 interview, noting that some of its planes hadn't had a product refresh since they were delivered in 2010-2011. Air India, which has a 30% share of the domestic passenger market, has a fleet of 198 planes, of which 27 are 10-15 years old and 43 are more than 15 years old, the civil aviation ministry told parliament in March. Air India Express had 101 planes, with 37% of them more than 15 years old. The plane that crashed on Thursday was 11 years old, according to Flightradar24. Rival Indian airlines like IndiGo ( opens new tab operate newer planes. Air India, which is part-owned by Singapore Airlines ( opens new tab, has placed orders for 570 new jets in recent years and is in talks for dozens more. It has even aggressively expanded its international flight network in the face of the fury of its passengers, who often take to social media to show soiled seats, broken arm rests, non-operational entertainment systems and dirty cabin areas. It has also been ranked the worst airline for flight delays in Britain, where its departures were on average just under 46 minutes behind schedule in 2024, according to analysis of Civil Aviation Authority data by the PA news agency published in May. It has also been reporting losses since at least fiscal 2019-20. In 2023-2024, it reported a net loss of $520 million on sales of $4.6 billion. Before it can make any further progress on these problems, however, it faces the difficult task of investigating one of India's worst aviation disasters ever. "This is a difficult day for all of us at Air India," CEO Wilson said in a video message. "Investigations will take time."
Reuters
5 hours ago
- Reuters
IMF says July forecasts to take into account trade deals, uncertainty
June 12 (Reuters) - The International Monetary Fund said on Thursday that its next global growth forecast in July will take into account both positive and negative trade developments but declined to predict a tariff-driven GDP downgrade similar to that released by the World Bank this week. IMF spokesperson Julie Kozack said that since the last release of the Fund's World Economic Outlook in April, there have been some positive developments that could support improved economic activity, including a major tariff reduction between the U.S. and China and an initial trade deal between the U.S. and Britain. "So taken together such announcements combined with the April 9 pause on the high level of tariffs, these could support activity relative to the forecast that we had in April," Kozack told a regular IMF news briefing. "But nonetheless, we do have an outlook for the global economy that remains subject to heightened uncertainty, especially as trade negotiations continue." The IMF also will take into account U.S. President Donald Trump's added steel and aluminum tariffs, she said. These have now reached 50% for all exporters. The World Bank on Tuesday slashed its 2025 global growth forecast by four-tenths of a percentage point from its January forecast to 2.3%, saying that higher tariffs and heightened uncertainty posed a "significant headwind" for nearly all economies. The development lender cut forecasts for nearly 70% of all economies - including the U.S., China and Europe, but the prior forecast came before Trump took office and imposed tariffs on nearly all trading partners. The IMF's steep April forecast cut did take into account Trump's initial tariff assault, reducing the 2025 global growth outlook by half a percentage point from its January forecast to 2.8%, with a slower decline in inflation. Kozack said the next IMF World Economic Outlook update will be issued toward the end of July, but did not provide a specific date. Trump's "reciprocal" tariff pause is currently scheduled to expire on July 8, with many countries seeking to negotiate tariff-reducing deals before then. And Trump has said there could be extensions of that deadline for countries engaged in good faith negotiations with the U.S. Kozack said that more recent activity indicators reflect "a complex economic landscape" with first quarter front-loading activity to beat tariffs, while there has been some diversion of trade and an unwinding of import activity in the second quarter. There also could be more trade deals or other developments to take into account. "So all of this creates kind of a complicated picture for us, with some upside risk, some other developments, and we'll take all of these developments together into account as we update our forecast," Kozack said.
