Welcome to this week’s edition of top stock market highlights where we bring you the latest news and corporate events.
Bank home loan rates
The trio of local banks, namely DBS Group (SGX: D05), United Overseas Bank Ltd (SGX: U11), or UOB, and OCBC Ltd (SGX: O39), have once again raised the rates on their mortgage loan offerings.
The latest increase is in line with rising interest rates as the US Federal Reserve hikes its benchmark policy rate to deal with surging inflation.
Singapore’s largest bank, DBS, is raising its fixed-rate housing loan interest rate to 3.5% from the earlier 2.75%.
This new rate now applies to all four of the lender’s packages with tenors of between two to five years.
Meanwhile, UOB announced that its two-year and three-year fixed-rate home loans bear interest rates of 3.75% and 3.85%, respectively.
Not to be outdone, OCBC has revised its two-year fixed rate to 3.5%, up from 2.98% just a fortnight ago.
The bank is also re-launching its one-year fixed rate package at 3.35%.
With higher rates across the board, homeowners should be prepared to fork out more in interest payments when they refinance their housing loans.
Singapore retail sales
Retail sales continued to rise in Singapore in August, continuing the trend seen in July.
Sales increased 13% year on year in August, slightly lower than the 13.9% year on year chalked up in the previous month.
The latest increase did fall below the 15.4% that analysts had expected.
The estimated total retail sales value for August came in at S$3.8 billion, of which online sales took up a 12.5% share.
Despite the slightly weaker numbers, August’s retail sales still represented a fifth consecutive month of double-digit year on year growth.
At the same time, elevated core inflation could dampen consumer demand in the months to come.
Along with higher interest rates, more households may tighten their belts and cut back on spending to service higher mortgage payments.
SATS Ltd (SGX: S58)
SATS has seen its share price lose a fifth of its value since it announced the acquisition of Worldwide Flight Services for almost S$1.64 billion.
Investors were concerned that the ground handler will finance the deal with a potential rights issue to raise the required S$1.7 billion to finance the purchase.
CEO Kerry Mok has come out to assure investors that the group is looking out for their interests and that a rights issue is one of four funding sources for the mega-deal.
He also acknowledged that SATS will have to scale down the size of the rights issue as in his own words: “the market does not like rights issues”.
In its original announcement for the acquisition, SATS had presented a funding plan that will involve the issuance of 609 million new shares at S$2.79 apiece.
The rights issue price was a steep discount of 28% to the food caterer’s then-closing price of S$3.87.
Other funding sources put forward include an acquisition bridge facility of €1.2 billion (around S$1.7 billion), internal cash resources, and new strategic investors.
The group may also tap into a mixture of the four sources to come up with an optimal plan to fund the acquisition.
Mok reiterated that investors should take a medium to long-term view of this deal as it will bring about tremendous benefits to SATS.
Elon Musk and Twitter (NYSE: TWTR)
After a series of back and forths on whether Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), signalled that he will move ahead and buy over Twitter.
The offer from Musk was US$54.20 per share, similar to the original agreement.
We wrote about how Musk had decided to terminate the deal back in July because of several concerns.
It seems the purchase is now back on the table, but Musk is asking Twitter to end a lawsuit regarding the deal so that it can be consummated.
The latter, however, is unwilling to withdraw the lawsuit.
A judge for the case has given Elon Musk until 28 October to close the deal if he wishes to avoid a trial.
The problem now is in securing the required financing for the deal as the Tesla CEO has yet to secure the required loans from both Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) and the Bank of America (NYSE: BAC), as well as other banks.
This saga will probably have a few more twists and turns before it concludes.
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Disclaimer: Royston Yang owns shares of DBS Group.
