SG Morning Highlights: Retrenchments fall to a record low in Q2 while job vacancies ease

Advancers / Decliners is 74 to 25, with 46.99 million securities worth S$59.05 million changing hands.

Retrenchments in Singapore fell to a record low in the second quarter of 2022, but the number of job vacancies decreased slightly as companies filled more positions, according to the Ministry of Manpower's (MOM) Labour Market Report on Wednesday (Sep 14).

The Health Sciences Authority (HSA) on Wednesday (Sep 14) granted interim authorisation for the use of Moderna's Spikevax bivalent Covid-19 vaccine, which targets both the original Sars-CoV-2 strain and the Omicron BA.1 variant.

The bivalent vaccine has been authorised for use as a booster for people aged 18 and above who have already received their primary series vaccination.

Official recommendations for this booster vaccine will be issued by the Expert Committee on Covid-19 Vaccination and the Ministry of Health in due time, HSA said.

The world has never been in a better position to end the Covid-19 pandemic, the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Wednesday (Sep 14), urging nations to keep up their efforts against the virus that has killed over 6 million people.

"We are not there yet. But the end is in sight," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters at a virtual press conference.

The comment was the most optimistic from the UN agency since it declared Covid-19 an international emergency and started describing the virus as a pandemic in March 2020.

A California man claims the electric-car maker has "deceptively and misleadingly marketed" its driver-assistance systems while stringing the public along with statements that the company is "perpetually on the cusp of perfecting" the technology.

"Although these promises have proven false time and time again, Tesla and Musk have continued making them to generate media attention, to deceive consumers into believing it has unrivalled cutting-edge technology, and to establish itself as a leading player in the fast-growing electric-vehicle market," Briggs A Matsko, a resident of Rancho Murieta, said in the proposed class action, filed on Wednesday (Sep 14) in San Francisco federal court.

Ethermine, the largest Ethereum mining services provider by computing power, will shut down its servers for miners after the blockchain completes its historic technical upgrade.

The news comes on the eve of Ethereum's highly-anticipated software revamp, dubbed the 'Merge', which will shift the most used blockchain from a proof of work consensus mechanism to proof of stake. This means that in less than 24 hours, it will no longer be possible to mine Ether on the Ethereum network, as the powerful graphic cards used to validate transaction data will be replaced with investors that stake Ether. Going forward, these validators will effectively secure the Ethereum blockchain and validate data on the network.

"As a consequence of this transition, the Ethermine Ethereum mining pool will switch to withdraw-only mode once the Proof-of-Work mining phase has ended," Ethermine tweeted on Wednesday (Sep 14). A countdown timer will appear on the miner dashboard and users will be able to mine Ether until it hits zero. At that point, "all Ethermine stratum servers will be shut down, and you will no longer be able to connect your miner to the Ethermine Ethereum pool", said the company.

Net loss for H1 FY2023 was mainly due to slower property sales for the development segment and the S$23.3 million loss on disposal of investment in associates, the company said in its financial statement filed to the bourse on Wednesday (Sep 14).

Revenue declined 44 per cent to S$49.8 million from S$88.9 million.

Mainboard-listed Keppel Corporation provided the update in a regulatory filing on Wednesday on its earlier application to the Singapore court for the injunction, and said it would provide further updates when there are material developments in the legal proceedings.

Keppel had disclosed that there were potential claims arising from disputes over the validity of certain foreign exchange fluctuations and cost escalation contractual formulas in a rig contract entered by the Keppel O&M entity.

The Asia-focused Reit is trading at a yield above 5 per cent, offering an attractive yield spread as the third-largest Singapore-listed Reit (S-Reit), DBS said in a report.

It has reinstated its coverage on the counter with a "buy" call and target price of S$2.30, implying a potential upside of 20.4 per cent on MPACT's last trading price of S$1.91 as at 4.08 pm on Wednesday. Its units were trading 1 per cent or S$0.02 lower at the time.

The property, which is located at 1 Buroh Lane, is the real estate investment trust's (Reit) first cold storage facility investment in Singapore, said William Tay, chief executive of the manager, in a press statement.

Assuming the proposed transaction was completed on Jan 1, 2021, the manager expects a distribution per unit accretion of 0.56 per cent or an improvement of 0.086 Singapore cent on a pro forma basis.