Stocks to watch: Singapore Airlines, CapitaLand Ascott Trust, ESR-Reit, First Sponsor, iFast
Singapore Airlines : The company reported a 58.8 per cent drop in Q1 FY2026 net profit to S$186 million on Monday, even as revenue rose 1.5 per cent to S$4.8 billion. The drop in net profit was mainly driven by lower interest income and share of losses of associates, said the airline. Meanwhile, the rise in revenue was driven by stronger demand across SIA and Scoot. The airline said it was facing challenges from geopolitical tensions, macroeconomic fluctuations, and changing market dynamics. Tariffs were also set to continue to affect the cargo network of the airline. The counter closed up 0.4 per cent or S$0.03 at S$7.60 on Monday.
CapitaLand Ascott Trust : The manager on Tuesday posted a 1 per cent drop in distribution per stapled security to S$0.0253 for its first half ended Jun 30, from S$0.0255 in the previous corresponding period. Revenue for the first half inched up 3 per cent to S$398.5 million from S$386.4 million in the year-ago period, as gross profit rose 6 per cent, to S$182.5 million from S$172.9 million. Stapled securities of CapitaLand Ascott Trust ended on Monday 0.5 per cent or S$0.005 lower at S$0.905.
ESR-Reit : It posted a 0.2 per cent rise in distribution per unit to S$0.11239 for the first half ended Jun 30, from S$0.1122 in the corresponding year-ago period. The distribution will be paid out on Sep 12, after the record date of Aug 6. Net property income rose by 30.1 per cent to S$166.3 million from S$127.8 million in H1 FY2024, while revenue for the half-year period increased 23.2 per cent to S$222.9 million from S$180.9 million. Units of ESR-Reit closed on Monday 1.9 per cent or S$0.05 higher at S$2.64.
First Sponsor : The property developer reported on Monday a 59.2 per cent jump in H1 2025 earnings, up to S$19 million, mainly driven by a higher share of profits from associates and joint ventures. However, its revenue dropped 11 per cent to S$153.9 million in the first half of the financial year compared to the same period in 2024. The revenue dip was largely attributed to a fall in revenue from the sale of development properties, property financing and hotel operations, though mitigated by an increase in rental income from investment properties. The company's shares closed flat at S$1.05 on Monday.
iFast : Shares in iFast surged 11.3 per cent on Monday after the digital banking firm reported strong Q2 net profit. It hit an intraday peak of S$8.26 – 11.3 per cent higher than its last close of S$7.42 – at 4.30 pm, with a trading volume of 7.1 million shares. The company also announced plans to target higher dividend payout ratio at a briefing on Monday. The counter ended the day at S$8.17, up 10.1 per cent, with 7.5 million shares transacted.
Keppel Pacific Oak US Reit : The office Reit posted a drop in H1 FY2025 distributable income on Tuesday, down 16.2 per cent to US$19.9 million from US$23.8 million across the same period last year. It also stated that it had a positive 0.5 per cent rental reversion for H1 and a positive 3.3 per cent rental reversion for Q2 2025. No distribution was declared. The manager had announced previously it would suspend distributions for two years from H2 FY2023 to H2 FY2025. The counter closed on Monday 2.2 per cent or S$0.005 higher at S$0.23.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Times
an hour ago
- Business Times
VinFast to spin off R&D assets in 39.8 trillion dong deal with founder
[HANOI] Vietnamese electric vehicle maker VinFast Auto announced plans to spinoff part of its research and development unit into a newly formed company, which will then be sold to the automaker's founder in a deal worth about US$1.5 billion, according to a filing. The newly-formed company, Novatech Research and Development, will be carved out from VinFast Trading and Production (VFTP) and will initially remain a direct subsidiary of VinFast, according to the statement. VinFast will own about 38 per cent stake in Novatech, it added. Novatech will hold assets related to costs of completed research and development projects. After the creation of the new entity, VinFast will sell all of its shares in Novatech to its founder and chief executive officer Pham Nhat Vuong for about 39.8 trillion dong (US$1.5 billion), according to the statement. The transaction 'reflects a further effort by the founder to facilitate VinFast's long-term growth,' the statement said. VFTP will remain a direct subsidiary of VinFast and continue to operate its core EV manufacturing business in Vietnam and conduct future research and development on new products and technologies. Vuong, who is Vietnam's richest man with a US$10.9 billion fortune according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has pumped more than US$2 billion of his own money into VinFast and has said he's willing to support the company until his cash runs out. VinFast earlier this month inaugurated a factory in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu which will have an initial production capacity of 50,000 vehicles a year. It expects to open a plant in Indonesia by October. In 2024, VinFast delivered 97,399 EVs globally and expects to at least double that this year, with 200,000 deliveries in Vietnam. BLOOMBERG
Business Times
an hour ago
- Business Times
OUE back in the black with H1 net profit of S$35.6 million
[SINGAPORE] OUE recorded a net profit of S$35.6 million for the first half of 2025, reversing from the S$96.1 million loss in the year-ago period. The real estate and healthcare group on Thursday (Aug 14) said the turnaround was due mainly to S$94.9 million in provisional negative goodwill recognised for the acquisition of additional equity interests in an equity-accounted investee. It also cited higher adjusted earnings before interest and taxes, as well as greater finance income. However, H1 revenue fell 6.9 per cent to US$292.8 million, from S$314.5 million in the same period the year before. 'This was mainly due to lower contribution from the group's real estate segment, which decreased 9.7 per cent to S$194.5 million from S$215.4 million in H1 2024,' OUE said. In the latest period, the group's investment properties and fund management division recorded an 8.5 per cent decline in revenue to S$95.1 million. This was attributed largely to the absence of contributions from Lippo Plaza Shanghai, which was divested last December. Hospitality division revenue was 9.8 per cent lower at S$99.2 million in H1 2025, following a high base in 2024 which was driven by several high-profile events and concerts in Singapore, as well as the start of the visa-waiver arrangement between the city-state and China. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Softer travel demand and consumer spending, ongoing macroeconomic headwinds and geopolitical tensions also weighed on the performance in H1 2025. OUE's healthcare segment revenue was S$75.3 million, comparable with the S$76.3 million in H1 2024. The group's other revenue segment – primarily contributions from its food and beverage operations – recorded S$23 million in H1, up slightly from the S$22.8 million the year before. OUE said: 'While dining concepts launched last year contributed for the full period, this was offset by softer consumer demand amid macroeconomic uncertainties and market saturation.' The group reported earnings per share of S$0.047 in H1 2025, as opposed to a loss per share of S$0.1142 in H1 2024. An interim dividend of S$0.01 per share was declared, unchanged from that in the year-ago period. 'Despite the challenging backdrop, the group's portfolio, comprising prime and strategically located commercial properties with a diversified tenant base, hospitality and retail assets, as well as the complementary healthcare segment, is expected to provide stable performance in 2025,' OUE said. Shares of OUE closed flat at S$1.12 on Thursday, before the announcement.
Business Times
an hour ago
- Business Times
Perplexity's bid for Google Chrome is mostly mischief
IF YOU are fighting an antitrust lawsuit that might end up breaking your company into pieces, one defence is to argue that those pieces would wither away if separated from the mothership, thus creating a worse outcome for the consumer. That is what Google has been doing in the face of Department of Justice (DOJ) calls for it to sell Chrome, its market-leading web browser, as part of the remedies for its monopolistic behaviours involving its search business. The company wrote on its blog in May: 'DOJ's proposal to break off Chrome – which billions of people use for free – would break it and result in a 'shadow of the current Chrome', according to Chrome leader Parisa Tabriz. She added that the browser would likely become 'insecure and obsolete'.' This defence was complicated somewhat on Tuesday (Aug 12) when it emerged that Perplexity, an artificial-intelligence (AI) company, had made an 'audacious' (Bloomberg), 'long-shot' (The Wall Street Journal) and 'mischievous' (me) bid to take Chrome off Google's hands for US$34.5 billion. Perplexity doesn't have US$34.5 billion – the company was valued at US$18 billion at the time of its last funding round – but said it would pull the money together from a coalition of investors who are already on board with the plan. The deal would realistically be possible only if the court does indeed force the Alphabet unit to sell Chrome, which, according to most analysts I have spoken to, would be an extreme measure. But it is certainly not an impossibility. Indeed, it might have become slightly more possible thanks to Perplexity's bid and what might come next. But before I get into that, let's humour this for a second and talk about why buying Chrome would make sense for Perplexity. The Web browser, as I was discussing earlier this week, has become a critical early battleground for shaping new habits in AI. Perplexity realises this and recently introduced its own browser, Comet, which places its own AI assistant front and centre. If you type a query into the address bar, Comet will, instead of searching Google, turn to its AI instead. (After almost a month of using it, I'm not at all sold that this is an improvement, but that's for another column.) BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up At scale, this shift in behaviour – from search engine to AI – would be profound. The problem is that Comet, which is being used by only a handful of users in an early-access programme, has a minuscule market share compared with Chrome's 70 per cent of desktop browser use globally and 67 per cent on mobile. Following loose estimates of about 3.5 billion users of Chrome, napkin math suggests that Perplexity would be paying about US$10 per user. The goal then, of course, would be to convert as many of them as possible to users of its US$20-a-month 'Pro' AI plan. As AI business models go, it is actually not bad. Unlike its biggest competitors, Perplexity lacks a shop window for its AI, an existing highly used product where users can discover the functionality of AI without having to consciously go looking for it. Buying Chrome certainly makes a lot more sense than Perplexity's previous headline-grabbing mergers and acquisitions move, which was a merger bid for TikTok. Still, the lack of movement in Alphabet's share price on Tuesday suggests that investors have brushed off the possibility. For starters, some analysts think the valuation is way off. The offer 'vastly undervalues the asset, and should not be taken seriously', according to Baird. A better number, its analysts said, would be more like US$100 billion – though it's hard to say how the dynamics of a deal would play out if Google had no choice but to sell Chrome. Previous valuations put it somewhere between US$30 billion and US$50 billion, a figure that seems a little conservative if the browser is indeed pivotal to building AI market share. Regardless, what this bid truly represents is a cunning plan to get in the ear of Judge Amit Mehta as he considers the appropriate antitrust remedies for Google's prior bad behaviour. By making this move, Perplexity is skewering Google's defence that spinning out Chrome would be fatal to not just Chrome but to Chromium, the open-source project that forms the backbone of most top Web browsers, including Google's direct competitors. It can now be sincerely argued that there's a bona fide offer from a company capable of not only taking Chrome out of Google's hands but developing it further – keeping it from becoming 'insecure and obsolete', as Google warned. What's more, it seems likely other AI companies will throw their names into the running. OpenAI's head of ChatGPT testified during the trial that the company would be interested in buying Chrome, 'as would many other parties'. How much the judge takes any of this into account when making his ruling is another thing. He probably should not. The rationale to force a sale of Chrome would be to prevent Alphabet from creating a new AI monopoly with the same tactics it used to dominate the world of search. Fine, but Judge Mehta has other tools at his disposal to achieve that more fairly. After all, the only reason an AI company would be interested in buying Chrome, at a cost that's double its existing value, would be to use the browser for those same anti-competitive ends. BLOOMBERG
