Latest news with #Aw
New Straits Times
4 days ago
- Business
- New Straits Times
KPJ Healthcare downgraded as valuations catch up: Analyst
KUALA LUMPUR: CIMB Securities has downgraded KPJ Healthcare Bhd to a "Hold" from "Buy", saying the group's share price has largely priced in operational improvements and the new management's swift execution. In a note to clients, analyst Walter Aw said KPJ Healthcare's stock, which has surged 26.5 per cent year-to-date, is now trading close to two standard deviations above its five-year forward average valuation. "At current levels, we believe valuations have caught up with fundamentals. The stock is now trading at a premium compared to its larger peer IHH Healthcare Bhd, based on projected 2026 earnings," he said. Despite the downgrade, the firm raised its sum-of-parts-based target price for KPJ Healthcare to RM3 from RM2.80 previously, reflecting a higher valuation multiple of 12.3 times for the group's hospital operations. The group's first quarter core net profit rose 23.6 per cent year-on-year to RM63.3 million, in line with consensus estimates. Revenue climbed seven per cent to RM971.8 million on increased bed capacity and higher patient volume. However, the results were weaker on a quarter-on-quarter basis, with core net profit down 48.2 per cent from the fourth quarter of 2024, due to seasonal trends. Aw said earnings momentum is expected to pick up in subsequent quarters, supported by bed capacity expansion, improved cost controls and narrowing losses from five newer hospitals that are still in their gestation phase. CIMB Securities projects KPJ Heatlcare's core net profit to grow 12.9 per cent year-on-year in 2025, with revenue forecasted to rise 9.1 per cent to RM4.28 billion. The group's bottom line is expected to benefit from ongoing cost optimisation, better operating leverage, and a strategy to attract more patients by building centres of excellence and hiring more specialists. Despite these growth levers, the firm warned of downside risks including lower-than-expected patient traffic, slower hospital ramp-ups and thinner margins. KPJ Healthcare was last traded at RM2.72, giving it a market capitalisation of RM12.31 billion.
Boston Globe
28-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
US orders pause on new visa interviews for foreign students
The move was assailed by Rob McCarron, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts. 'It's another example of the Trump administration using chaos and uncertainty to punitively target the 80,000 international students who choose to study in Massachusetts because of our world-renowned reputation in higher education,' McCarron said. 'Our vitality rests squarely on the innovation, education, and research taking place across our campuses every day. Today's developments will make it more difficult for those students to study here and will only serve to undermine the unique competitive advantage of the United States.' Advertisement As part of rapidly evolving policy on foreign students, the order followed Advertisement In its lawsuit Friday morning, Harvard said the revocation would have 'immediate and devastating effect for Harvard and more than 7,000 visa holders,' or about one-quarter of the student body. The Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, said the administration was punishing Harvard for its refusal to turn over a trove of documentation about foreign students the White House demanded last month. The administration has alleged that its concerns center on antisemitism on campus, but opponents argue Trump's target actually is the academic culture of the country's elite universities. Several foreign students, including Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, have been detained for pro-Palestinian activities. Öztürk, who was arrested in March outside her residence in Somerville, had written an op-ed for the Tufts student newspaper that criticized the university's stance on the Israel-Hamas war. A federal judge in Vermont The sudden pause in visa interviews 'is deeply disappointing, but not surprising,' said Fanta Aw, chief executive of NAFSA. 'What is most disappointing is that international students are seen as potential threats — threats to national security.' In Aw's view, Trump is sending a clear and chilling message to foreign students and their families. 'This is about their life. This is about their studies,' Aw said. 'This is government action that signals you're not welcome. Why would students put themselves through this?' The halt in interviews will continue until the State Department establishes new criteria for checking an applicant's social media history, the government said. New guidance is expected soon, according to the cable, which was Advertisement 'Effective immediately, in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting, consular sections should not add any additional student or exchange visitor . . . visa-appointment capacity until further guidance is issued,' Rubio wrote. The order affects students seeking F visas, scholars and exchange visitors on J visas, and students who use M visas for vocational training. State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce defended the visa-screening process at a news briefing Tuesday. 'We take very seriously the process of vetting, who it is that comes into the country,' Bruce said. 'And we're going to continue to do that. We're going to continue to vet.' Harvard officials did not respond to a Boston Globe request for comment. In addition to revoking Harvard's ability to enroll foreign students, the Trump administration is seeking to void all federal contracts with the university, totaling about $100 million, and considering diverting $3 billion in Harvard grants to trade schools. Officials at Northeastern University, which enrolls more than 20,000 foreign students, said they are gauging the effect of the State Department's order to stop scheduling new visa appointments for student and exchange applicants. 'This is a very dynamic situation, and we are closely monitoring the developments in real time to assess any potential impacts,' Renata Nyul, vice president of communications at NU, said Tuesday. 'We have a robust set of resources for our incoming and current international students, as well as contingency plans for those who might experience delays in visa processing,' Nyul added. Aw said a delay of even a few days until visa interviews can be scheduled can make or break the ability of some applicants to file on time, particularly if they come from countries where the US Embassy is short on staffing. Advertisement 'In some cases, the point of no return has already passed,' Aw said. 'The message that this sends is one that is not lost on students and their families.' Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at
Tatler Asia
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Tatler Asia
Jemimah Wei on the story behind her debut novel and what it means to be a writer in Southeast Asia
The lack of a visible literary infrastructure in Southeast Asia, as compared to the American or British publishing worlds, has long posed a challenge. 'When I first started out, I didn't even know what an MFA was. I thought you just emailed a publisher [your manuscript]. I didn't know what a slush pile (a collection of unsolicited manuscripts) or a query letter was. I didn't even know how to ask the right questions.' It was not until she met Aw and later moved to the US for her graduate studies that she began to absorb the tacit knowledge of the publishing world. '[In Singapore], you don't have the chance to do that as much.' However, this is changing, Wei points out, with authors such as Rachel Heng and Wen-yi Lee securing global book deals—a shift made possible by the growing access to international agents and publishing pathways. But the emotional terrain remains steep. 'If you don't have people who take your work seriously, you don't have that confirmation of your artistic reality,' she observes. 'Without that, it's very easy to give up.' For Wei, the community does not have to be big. But it has to be real. 'People use the word 'community' a lot, but it means friendship for me. You just need people who care enough to talk to you about your work seriously.' Now that The Original Daughter is complete, Wei is learning to sit with the stillness that follows a long pursuit. 'It seemed conceivable that I would forever have this book simmering in the background while I write endless short stories and scripts,' she says. '[When you've been working on something] for a long time, your artistic identity can become co-dependent with it.' Completing it, she admits, was liberating. 'I feel very free to explore what the next stage will be.' NOW READ How author Simon Tay's latest memoir honours his late father, Singapore's pioneer spy chief Author Kyla Zhao on writing her first children's book, sexism in competitive chess and Asian representation in modern literature Butter author Asako Yuzuki on her true-crime-inspired bestselling novel, fatphobia and the rise of feminist literature in Japan
The Guardian
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The South by Tash Aw review – an intimate epic begins
Picture a farm that has been in a family for generations and can no longer be made to pay; there's an orchard of beloved trees that may have to be chopped down. It's a hot, dry summer and two estranged brothers decline into middle age while their adolescent children wait desperately for their lives to begin. This is a world we'd expect to find in a play by Chekhov, rather than a novel by Tash Aw, who has made his name with exuberant, heavily plotted portraits of life in Malaysia and China, the characters edging between makeshift grifting and actual criminality. But now he has distilled his vision of the novel into something smaller and more intense. The South takes place on a single farm in rural south Malaysia over a single summer in the 1990s, and shows Aw breaking into newly empathetic and impactful territory with his already considerable novelistic panache and artfulness. The book soaks us in bodily intimacy from the outset, opening with a description of two boys having sex for the first time in the orchard. Jay, who has longed for this for weeks, wants to draw out the moment, so that 'whatever time they have together will feel like many hours, a whole day', while Chuan seems to want 'to accelerate each second and collapse time'. Aw is brilliant at compressing sociological insight into intimate scenes, and here the boys' differences of wealth and education emerge implicitly. Jay's father Jack was the legitimate son of their grandfather, who bought the farm as a young man. Jack is a relatively wealthy intellectual, a professor of mathematics in urban Malaysia, albeit a frustrated and disappointed man who has just lost his job. Chuan's father Fong is their grandfather's illegitimate son and has spent his life managing this farm he doesn't own, leaving Chuan to grow up feral and barely schooled. Now the two families have come together for a summer after the grandfather has died and left the farm, quixotically, to Jay's mother Sui, a once bright and ambitious woman subdued by marriage to Jack. Aw has often told stories from the perspective of a writer outsider, whether it's the son who discovers his father was capable of real feeling he never saw for himself in his 2005 debut The Harmony Silk Factory, or the ethnographer who develops a half-tender, half-exploitative rapport with her murderer interviewee in his 2019 novel We, the Survivors. Now a much older Jay moves fluidly between first and third person to narrate what's at once his own coming-of-age story and an expansive portrait of his unhappy parents and their social world, with his mother gaining special depth and interiority. Already in that opening scene, Jay's adult voice intrudes. 'At that age, what does either of them really know about time?' he asks, and time lies in wait as a preoccupation that the book will have to confront. This is a story about people who are both waiting for life to begin and living with an intensity they will look back on for ever. Jay is precociously aware of this, drawing his fingers over Chuan's skin, 'trying to work out how he will remember it at a later time, what words he will use to describe it later'. What's painful in these scenes between the boys is that Jay is more involved, moment by moment, than Chuan is, because he's more committed to erotic experience. He is, though, half-aware that Chuan is more involved in the relationship as a whole, while Jay knows as they drive to their first nightclub that there will be 'other men on other roads leading to other towns'. Jay at 16 is already the writer, seeking experience, and the book's preoccupation with memory becomes not so much a theme as a way of life. What makes the novel so masterly is that questions of memory are embedded in the structure with an apparent casualness that saves it from feeling overly engineered. Jay shifts between past and present, first and third person, as someone might shift about in their seat: trying to get comfortable, to inhabit these moments as he experienced them at the time and as he experiences them now. Like Chekhov's Russia, Aw's Malaysia is both a universally resonant vision of a timeless and placeless lost world, and a historically precise portrait of a country undergoing rapid modernisation. The country's economic precarity is tied to the fate of the farm. As the currency loses its value, Jack and Fong between them sell off land, while at Jay's school in town, bankrupt families return to the provinces, leaving classroom chairs placed upside down on vacated desks 'as if to commemorate past lives'. In the background are climate shifts that exacerbate these difficulties. Our present cycles of drought and flooding were already happening in Malaysia in the 1990s. The orchard destroyed to make way for a building project is a symbol of a lost way of life, as for Chekhov, but is also indicative of larger threats to the climate. This is the first novel in a quartet described as an 'epic for our times'. I worry that after the vitality of this portrait of a moment, it might be tedious to read book after book about Jay and Chuan and their descendants as they age. But Aw has moved beyond his previous novels to discover a different kind of writing here, emerging as a Proustian chronicler of momentary bodily and mental experience writing on a compressed, exquisite scale. Perhaps he will follow Proust in using his newly revealed capacity for blending the timeless and the historical to reinvent what an epic can be. Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury, £10.99). Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The South by Tash Aw is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The South by Tash Aw review – an intimate epic begins
Picture a farm that has been in a family for generations and can no longer be made to pay; there's an orchard of beloved trees that may have to be chopped down. It's a hot, dry summer and two estranged brothers decline into middle age while their adolescent children wait desperately for their lives to begin. This is a world we'd expect to find in a play by Chekhov, rather than a novel by Tash Aw, who has made his name with exuberant, heavily plotted portraits of life in Malaysia and China, the characters edging between makeshift grifting and actual criminality. But now he has distilled his vision of the novel into something smaller and more intense. The South takes place on a single farm in rural south Malaysia over a single summer in the 1990s, and shows Aw breaking into newly empathetic and impactful territory with his already considerable novelistic panache and artfulness. The book soaks us in bodily intimacy from the outset, opening with a description of two boys having sex for the first time in the orchard. Jay, who has longed for this for weeks, wants to draw out the moment, so that 'whatever time they have together will feel like many hours, a whole day', while Chuan seems to want 'to accelerate each second and collapse time'. Aw is brilliant at compressing sociological insight into intimate scenes, and here the boys' differences of wealth and education emerge implicitly. Jay's father Jack was the legitimate son of their grandfather, who bought the farm as a young man. Jack is a relatively wealthy intellectual, a professor of mathematics in urban Malaysia, albeit a frustrated and disappointed man who has just lost his job. Chuan's father Fong is their grandfather's illegitimate son and has spent his life managing this farm he doesn't own, leaving Chuan to grow up feral and barely schooled. Now the two families have come together for a summer after the grandfather has died and left the farm, quixotically, to Jay's mother Sui, a once bright and ambitious woman subdued by marriage to Jack. This a story about people who are both waiting for life to begin and living with an intensity they will look back on for ever Aw has often told stories from the perspective of a writer outsider, whether it's the son who discovers his father was capable of real feeling he never saw for himself in his 2005 debut The Harmony Silk Factory, or the ethnographer who develops a half-tender, half-exploitative rapport with her murderer interviewee in his 2019 novel We, the Survivors. Now a much older Jay moves fluidly between first and third person to narrate what's at once his own coming-of-age story and an expansive portrait of his unhappy parents and their social world, with his mother gaining special depth and interiority. Already in that opening scene, Jay's adult voice intrudes. 'At that age, what does either of them really know about time?' he asks, and time lies in wait as a preoccupation that the book will have to confront. This is a story about people who are both waiting for life to begin and living with an intensity they will look back on for ever. Jay is precociously aware of this, drawing his fingers over Chuan's skin, 'trying to work out how he will remember it at a later time, what words he will use to describe it later'. What's painful in these scenes between the boys is that Jay is more involved, moment by moment, than Chuan is, because he's more committed to erotic experience. He is, though, half-aware that Chuan is more involved in the relationship as a whole, while Jay knows as they drive to their first nightclub that there will be 'other men on other roads leading to other towns'. Jay at 16 is already the writer, seeking experience, and the book's preoccupation with memory becomes not so much a theme as a way of life. What makes the novel so masterly is that questions of memory are embedded in the structure with an apparent casualness that saves it from feeling overly engineered. Jay shifts between past and present, first and third person, as someone might shift about in their seat: trying to get comfortable, to inhabit these moments as he experienced them at the time and as he experiences them now. Like Chekhov's Russia, Aw's Malaysia is both a universally resonant vision of a timeless and placeless lost world, and a historically precise portrait of a country undergoing rapid modernisation. The country's economic precarity is tied to the fate of the farm. As the currency loses its value, Jack and Fong between them sell off land, while at Jay's school in town, bankrupt families return to the provinces, leaving classroom chairs placed upside down on vacated desks 'as if to commemorate past lives'. In the background are climate shifts that exacerbate these difficulties. Our present cycles of drought and flooding were already happening in Malaysia in the 1990s. The orchard destroyed to make way for a building project is a symbol of a lost way of life, as for Chekhov, but is also indicative of larger threats to the climate. This is the first novel in a quartet described as an 'epic for our times'. I worry that after the vitality of this portrait of a moment, it might be tedious to read book after book about Jay and Chuan and their descendants as they age. But Aw has moved beyond his previous novels to discover a different kind of writing here, emerging as a Proustian chronicler of momentary bodily and mental experience writing on a compressed, exquisite scale. Perhaps he will follow Proust in using his newly revealed capacity for blending the timeless and the historical to reinvent what an epic can be. • Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury, £10.99). • The South by Tash Aw is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
