SG Morning Highlights | Singapore, EU sign partnership to strengthen bilateral digital trade

Advancers / Decliners is 97 to 54, with 104.99 million securities worth S$133.18 million changing hands.

Shaky property markets across much of the world pose another risk to the global economy as higher interest rates erode household finances and threaten to exacerbate falling prices.

Reports this week have shown the US housing slump stretched into a fifth month, China's home sales slide continued and price declines persisted in both Australia and New Zealand.

Sliding home values threaten to undermine consumer confidence and weigh on household spending, which had been a rare bright spot for the global economy last year. Investment too could take a hit as developers scale back projects in response to falling prices, waning demand and higher borrowing costs.

OpenAI, the creator of the popular chatbot ChatGPT, has released a software tool to identify text generated by artificial intelligence, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday (Feb 1).

ChatGPT is a free programme that generates text in response to a prompt, including articles, essays, jokes and even poetry, which has gained wide popularity since its debut in November, while raising concerns about copyright and plagiarism.

The AI classifier, a language model trained on the dataset of pairs of human-written and AI-written text on the same topic, aims to distinguish text that is written by AI. It uses a variety of providers to address issues such as automated misinformation campaigns and academic dishonesty, the company said.

Singapore and the European Union (EU) have signed a digital partnership that will strengthen connectivity and interoperability between both digital markets, enabling people and businesses to transact digitally more seamlessly and at lower costs.

The EU-Singapore Digital Partnership (EUSDP) was signed by Singapore's Minister-in-charge of Trade Relations S Iswaran and European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton in Brussels on Wednesday (Feb 1).

The EUSDP will serve as an overarching framework for all areas of bilateral digital cooperation between the EU and Singapore. These include areas in the cross-border digital economy such as digital trade facilitation, trusted data flows, electronic payments, as well as standards and conformance. It will also pave the way for cooperation in new and emerging areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), digital identities, and 5G/6G.

More companies expanded overseas with the support of Enterprise Singapore (EnterpriseSG) in 2022, with about half of them doing so for the first time, the statutory board's year-in-review showed on Wednesday (Feb 1).

Some 2,000 firms ventured abroad in 2022, a 25 per cent increase from the previous two years when international borders were largely closed during the pandemic. This is, however, lower than the pre-Covid level of 2,600 in 2019.

Close to 80 per cent of these companies were starting or restarting their internationalisation efforts and going into new markets for the first time in three years, said EnterpriseSG chief executive Png Cheong Boon. He added that many tapped the Market Readiness Assistance grant.

The Reit maintained a 100 per cent occupancy for its logistics and industrial (L&I) portfolio, while its commercial portfolio recorded an 89.8 per cent occupancy rate. Overall occupancy came in at 95.9 per cent.

Aggregate leverage stood at 27.9 per cent as at end-December, up 0.5 percentage points from end-September; meanwhile, its cost of borrowings stood at 1.7 per cent for the quarter, up 0.1 percentage points from end-September. The Reit has an average weighted debt maturity of 2.7 years, with total gross borrowings at close to S$2 billion as at end-December.

Net profit for the six-month period ended Dec 31, 2022 fell to S$277,000 from S$23.5 million in the corresponding period a year ago.

The group said in the bourse filing that the lower profits were due to "lower revenue streams coupled with higher finance costs resulting from rising interest rates and lower mark-to-market fair-value gain on derivative financial instruments".

Stripping out the anniversary distribution of S$0.0027, the DPU for H2 FY2022 would have been S$0.0268. That is 5.3 per cent lower than FY2021's DPU of S$0.0283 after stripping out the padding of a capital gains distribution of S$0.0005 a unit or S$2 million.