MARKET UPDATES :
- THE Singapore government’s budget for FY2015 – to be delivered in Parliament on Feb 23, Monday – will be no ordinary one.Even as a celebratory tone is struck, the social and economic challenges confronting Singapore will need facing up to, too.Expectations run high for an expansionary budget, this being the year that Singapore celebrates 50 years of independence. That anticipation stems also from Budget 2015 being viewed as a pre-election budget.
- HDB resale prices in December 2014 dropped to a 41-month low since August 2011, data from Singapore Real Estate Exchange (SRX) Property revealed. This represents a 6.1 per cent decline from December 2013.Month-on-month, resale prices in December 2014 fell 0.4 per cent.The price slump was driven by HDB four- and five-room flats, whose resale prices fell 0.7 per cent and 0.3 per cent respectively.
- Singapore is updating guidelines on an accounting practice mired in controversy for helping multinational companies minimize their tax bills, as the city-state moves more in line with a crackdown by Western governments on aggressive tax avoidance. International taxation has come under scrutiny since a quirk of “transfer pricing” was found to have helped lower the tax bills of a number of multinationals, including Starbucks Corp , Google Inc and Amazon.com Inc. Such issues prompted the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to call on governments to revise tax treaties, tighten rules and share more information, in a project due for completion by the end of this year.
- OLAM International is changing its fiscal year-end from June 30 to December 31. This is to enable the company to comply with the group consolidation and reporting requirements of its majority shareholder.With this change, the company’s current fiscal year, which began on July 1, 2014, will end on December 31, 2015. After this, the company will follow a January-to- December fiscal year.To facilitate comparison with previous years, Olam said that it would provide historical pro-forma financial information for the financial years ended December 31, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011. This will be done before June 30, 2015.
- Singapore continues its transition from what is effectively an emerging market economy (growth driven by increases in labor, 25% of GDP within manufacturing) to a developed market focused on productivity growth. A structural transformation-driven end to the 13-year bull market in the local currency will make unhedged Singapore holdings less attractive for yield investors. This drives a weak view for domestic consumption, but is also driving the already improving export numbers. This divergence will continue, therefore we focus our investment risk on rate sensitives and external demand sectors.
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