SG Morning Highlights | Recovery continues for S-Reits with Singapore retail assets

Advancers / Decliners is 89 to 57, with 61.06 million securities worth S$78.45 million changing hands.

West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil remains under pressure, and is shaping up for another disappointing month in December 2022 when prices are down about 6 per cent thus far, following the decline posted in November. On Dec 7, 2022, the commodity closed at a new year-low level. The question now is whether the longer-term trend has changed for the WTI, given the big decline for the commodity since June, as prices peaked at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war.

The American Petroleum Institute showed a weekly crude oil stock drawdown of 6.426 million barrels on Dec 6, much greater than the forecast 3.884 million barrels. Data from the Energy Information Administration showed that crude oil inventories registered a drawdown of 5.187 million barrels, exceeding the 3.305 million barrels forecast on Dec 7. Despite the greater than expected drawdowns in oil implying a stronger demand, which is theoretically bullish for prices, this has not been enough to overcome global recessionary fears.

Bank of Singapore's chief executive officer (CEO) Bahren Shaari will be retiring by the end of this month after over 13 years at the bank, a private banking subsidiary of OCBC.

When first announcing this in an internal memo on Friday (Dec 16), OCBC CEO Helen Wong said Bahren's successor will be announced "as and when it is appropriate".

In the interim, Vincent Choo – OCBC's outgoing group chief risk officer who has been a director on the board of the Bank of Singapore since 2014 – will take over from Jan 1, 2023, according to the memo, a copy of which was seen by The Business Times.

Singapore's retail sales continued to rise in October 2022, though at a slower pace compared to the previous month. October's retail sales increased 10.4 per cent year on year (yoy), extending September's 11.3 per cent growth and marking its seventh consecutive month of double-digit yoy growth.

The estimated total retail sales value in October was S$4.0 billion, of which online retail sales made up an estimated 13.0 per cent, compared to the 13.9 per cent recorded in September. Analysts expect the growth momentum to continue into the last two months of 2022 as consumers enter the festive season and households front-load big-ticket item purchases ahead of the goods and services tax hike starting in 2023.

This is in line with the goods and services tax (GST) hikes announced by the government in February this year as well as "exceptional inflationary cost increases across manpower, fuel and electricity", said the group on Friday (Dec 16).

For standard regular basic mail, which are untracked mail that go into letterboxes, rates for the first two weight steps of 20 g and 40 g will be raised from S$0.30 and S$0.37, to S$0.31 and S$0.38, respectively, from Jan 1.

ValueMax raised S$45.14 million in gross proceeds from the issue of its three-month Series 005 commercial paper. Three family members of ValueMax executive chairman Yeah Hiang Nam had subscribed for 21.2 per cent of the issuance.

They are his wife Tan Hong Yee, and sons Yeah Chia Wei and Yeah Chia Kai, who had subscribed for S$7.66 million, S$1.6 million and S$300,000 respectively. Yeah Chia Wei is the company's chief credit and risk officer, while Yeah Chia Kai is chief executive officer.