Merry Christmas and happy holidays!
It’s a quiet week at the SGX but we did have a couple of news to share plus a major acqui-hire across the pond by NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA).
Volare Group bids for Alpha Integrated REIT
Volare Group has entered into a sales and purchase agreement with ESR Group (SEHK: M1GU) to acquire ESR’s 241.6 million units in Alpha Integrated REIT (AIR, SGX: M1GU), representing 21.5% of AIR, at S$0.40 per unit.
AIR was formerly called Sabana REIT.
Post-acquisition, Volare will control approximately 41.3% of the total issued units, crossing the 30% threshold stipulated by Rule 14 of the Singapore Code on Take-overs and Mergers.
This has triggered a mandatory cash offer at S$0.48 per unit for all remaining units.
The price represents a premium over all recent historical trading prices, including a slight 2% premium over its last transacted price and up to a 14.3% premium over its 12-month volume-weighted average price (VWAP).
Volare would like to keep AIR listed.
However, if AIR’s free float falls below 10%, it may be delisted from the SGX.
Debt Relief for Manulife US REIT
Manulife US REIT (SGX: BTOU) announced that lenders have formally executed concessions under its Master Restructuring Agreement (MRA), providing crucial relief for the beleaguered US office REIT.
The concessions include:
- An extension of the disposal deadline from 31 December 2025 to 30 June 2026
- An extension of the temporary relaxation of financial covenants, with the unencumbered gearing threshold relaxed to 80% (compared to 60%) and the Bank ICR (interest coverage ratio) relaxed to no less than 1.5 times (compared to two times).
Without these concessions, Manulife US REIT would not be in compliance with the requirement to maintain a Bank ICR of no less than two times, which was set begin from 1 January 2026.
However, Manulife US REIT must keep half-yearly distributions to Unitholders suspended until the achievement of the Reinstatement Conditions and the period during which the Bank ICR relaxation remains in effect.
Unitholders must continue waiting for any distribution resumption amid the challenging US office market.
NVIDIA’s US$20 Billion Groq Deal
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is making its largest purchase ever, acquiring assets from nine-year-old chip startup Groq for about $20 billion.
Groq was founded by creators of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, which competes with NVIDIA for artificial intelligence workloads.
Groq has been working on a different type of chip called an LPU (Language Processing Unit), which it has claimed can run LLMs at 10 times faster and using one-10th the energy.
Within the AI arena, Groq specialises in inference, where artificial intelligence (AI) models that have already been trained respond to requests from users.
In an email to employees, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said, “We plan to integrate Groq’s low-latency processors into the NVIDIA AI factory architecture, extending the platform to serve an even broader range of AI inference and real-time workloads.”
Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross along with Sunny Madra, the company’s president, and other senior leaders will join NVIDIA.
Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion three months ago.
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