Singapore

The tender for the White site at Peck Seah Street / Choon Guan Street was awarded for approximately $1.7 billion.

Willie Tham, currently the Chief Executive Officer of HSBC in Thailand, will assume the post effective January 2011.

The river project entails construction of an estimated 830-metre-long by 26-metre-wide drain, reconstruction of two 3-cell box culverts and the construction of ABC Waters design features, which will help cleanse rainwater runoff.

Singapore moved up from 18 to 14 on this year’s list of the world’s most expensive rents, with prime retail rent standing at US$ 473/ sf/annum.

The brokerage has set its STI target to 3,300 citing concerns that the government is likely to continue introducing measures to cool down the property market as well as the Monetary Authority of Singapore focusing on limiting growth in unit labour costs via a faster appreciation of the exchange rate.

Singapore was ranked 4th in terms of Grade A rental performance and considered the best in Asia Pacific alongside with Beijing. In the survey conducted by the Jones Land LaSalle on regional office rents, Singapore recorded a quarterly net effective rental growth of 10.9%. This helped increase the Asia Pacific Office Rental index by 1.8% in the third quarter.

Industrial production data for October will be another nail in the coffin on expectation of a technical recession in Singapore, according to DBS analysts. Firstly, we have pointed out even before the 3Q advance estimates that we do not expect a technical recession in 2H10. And last week’s October NODX figure dealt the first blow to all those recession talks. The headline export figure rose by a massive 34.5% (5.8% MoM sa) on account of turnaround in both electronics and pharmaceutical export sales. And what is required right now is an industrial output growth of more than 30% for the month, which will essentially bury all the recession talks. Specifically, a 33.3% YoY expansion has been penciled into our forecast as we expect both key electronics and the biomedical segments to deliver the goods. That will provide some much need growth juice to the overall manufacturing growth and drag the economy from the deep negative end of the growth spectrum back to the positive territory in the final quarter. We expect the economy to grow by about solid 11% QoQ saar in the fourth quarter, up from the record contraction of 18.7% in 3Q10. A turnaround in manufacturing growth will be the crucial tie breaker for that to happen.

Base effect and the pre-emptive monetary tightening by the central bank in April are reasons why inflation is expected to come in at 3.5% YoY, just a tad below the previous month’s reading of 3.7%.

Positive outlook for offshore O&G sector prompts the company to fortify its key offshore support, deepwater subsea and engineering services units for further growth.

Tenants worried as Grade A office rents shoot up 10/9 % in quarter, the most in Asia, making Singapore the fourth most expensive place in the region to set up shop.

Allows investors to respond earlier to developments outside European trading hours but affecting European equity markets.

With Singapore banks still trading at 1.4xFY11 P/BV, DBS says there is no reason to ignore them, and they are in fact are inexpensive relative to ASEAN peers. 

OCBC Bank said even the MAS is already comfortable with the probability of a 4-6% growth next year as no change to monetary policy outlook is likely to be made in the interim.

Although Singapore’s Q3 GDP growth slowed to 10.6% y-o-y and contracted by 18.7% q-o-q SAAR, the bank says the plunge was expected and should not be a cause for concern.

The market research specialist’s Asian network – which covers the company’s offices in India, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and China generated revenue totalling $1.7m while revenue for the previous quarters amounted to $4.9m.

The latest all-property Fair Value Index revealed that while Singapore remains a hot market for investors, Hong Kong is not, moving from hot to cold in Q3.