Month: April 2023

Could Optus’s cybersecurity attack become another Bharti Airtel for Singtel? In November 2019, Singtel posted its first quarterly loss due to the $1.93 billion pre-tax share of Bharti Airtel’s one-off charge in India. That India saga saw Singtel share price (SGX: Z74) plunging from $3.40 in late 2019 to a low of $2.00 in October 2020. The turmoil also saw the departure of former CEO, Chua Sock Koong in December 2020. Against this backdrop, investors must be holding their breath on the unfolding class action suit against its wholly-owned subsidiary, Optus.

On 21 April 2023, Singtel announced that “a class action against six (6) Australian Optus entities was filed in the Federal Court of Australia”. According to a Straits Times article, it was alleged that more than 100,000 current and former customers had joined in the class action suit. In my opinion, given the severity of the incident and the scale of the cybersecurity victims, the potential costs and fines may be at least US$1 billion based on Bharti Airtel saga. Of course, this is just my personal opinion and I could be wrong.

Last year, several analysts had predicted that the data breach could cost Singtel hefty costs of about US$500 million, to which Singtel had rubbished as “speculative”.

From $3.00 on 29 March 2023, AEM share price (SGX: AWX) rocketed 10% to hit $3.30 in recent days. Given the global economic slowdown and continuing downturn in the semiconductor industry, what could have propelled AEM share price (SGX: AWX)?

The revival of AEM share price (SGX: AWX) should be due to the recent good news from its most important client – Intel, which provided its business update on 30 March 2023. After four delays over two years, Intel finally launches its much-anticipated 4^th generation Xeon processors, Sapphire Rapids for both laptops and servers. According to Intel, this is the highest quality data center CPU the company has ever delivered, and the ramp is continuing aggressively.

But what made the recent Intel’s announcement so special for AEM share price (SGX: AWX) was the series of upcoming product launches by Intel. Following Sapphire Rapids, hot on the heels will be the launch of Intel’s 5^th generation Xeon processors, Emerald Rapids in 4^th quarter 2023.

And that’s not all, Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids will be released by Intel in 2024. The series of product launches showed that Intel is determined to regain its market share in the data center CPU segment.

Amid the challenging operating environment, Mapletree Logistics Trust (SGX: M44U) bucked the trend and embarked on yet another round of asset acquisitions, acquiring new logistics assets in Japan, Australia, South Korea and China. Total cost of acquisitions came up to about $1.122 billion.

For a moment, my heart sunk upon seeing the announcement as the thought of another mega rights issue would be on the way crossed my mind. Thankfully, it turned out that the management has opted for a combination of private placement ($200 million) and bank loans ($746.8 million).

The private placement will see placement of between 121,285,000 and 124,223,000 new units at an issue price of between $1.610 and $1.649 per new unit. In connection to the private placement, a distributable income of 2.502 cents per unit will be paid to unitholders for the period from 1 January 2023 to the day immediately prior to the date on which the new units would be issued.

Year-to-date, Mapletree Logistics Trust (SGX: M44U) unit price increased by about 9.5%. The counter was featured in the February SGX Top Ten Institutional Net Buy Stocks, with net buying value of $14.3 million. Looking back, the past one year had been torrid for most S-REITs due to the relentless interest rate hikes by US Federal Reserves.

Troubles come in troops for DBS Group Holdings share price (SGX: D05). The recent online service outage caused an uproar in Singapore, with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) saying that the disruption was “unacceptable”. The MAS will also be taking actions against DBS after investigation is completed. In light of this mess, what will the implication be for DBS Group Holdings share price (SGX: D05) in the coming months?

For DBS Group Holdings, it is a case of lightning strikes thrice as the 29 March 2023 service outage was actually the third time for DBS. The previous incidents took place in November 2021 and July 2010. For the 2021 incident, the MAS has imposed an extra capital requirement of $930 million on DBS. This was four times higher than the amount imposed on the bank for the 2010 incident. Evidently, the extra capital requirements had not been effective as the latest outage took place just 16 months from the 2021 incident.

Will the MAS impose a significant civil penalty on DBS? It remains to be seen as analysts had claimed that the MAS is likely to impose another round of extra capital requirement on DBS, albeit at a much higher amount than the 2021 version.