Brian Wee

• 🏙️ Hongkong Land (HKL) is turbocharging its shift into fund management with the Singapore Central Private Real Estate Fund (SCPREF) — a S$8B+ vehicle anchored by some of the CBD’s most coveted assets. • 💰 Seeded with MBFC Towers 1 & 2 (33%), One Raffles Quay (33%) and One Raffles Link (100%), SCPREF crystallises value from HKL’s “crown jewels” while keeping operating control firmly in-house. • 🔁 In a savvy carve-out, HKL sold its 33% stake in MBFC Tower 3 directly to Keppel REIT for S$1.5B (about US$1.1B) at roughly a 2% premium to book — freeing up cash, proving valuations, and still reserving the best mix of assets for its own fund platform. • 🔧 This is the first hard execution of HKL’s “Strategy 2035” pivot: exiting low-multiple build-to-sell development and scaling a higher-multiple, fee-driven third‑party asset management franchise. • 📈 The S$8B (~US$6.2B) SCPREF is just the opening move in a plan to grow to US$100B AUM by 2035, recasting HKL from a discounted property conglomerate into a regional alternatives and real assets manager. • 📉 Today the equity still trades at a steep 25–35% discount to NAV, despite holding trophy Singapore and Hong Kong real estate — a gap that long-frustrated shareholders (including the Kadoorie family and institutions) want closed. • 🧮 When sovereign wealth funds, pensions and family offices commit capital into SCPREF at or above book value, they effectively re-rate HKL’s portfolio in public view and validate management’s intrinsic value narrative. • 🏦 The MBFC Tower 3 sale and the SCPREF launch send the same message: the private market is willing to pay what the public market won’t — forcing a rethink of the perennial “conglomerate discount.” • 💸 Instead of passively sitting on assets, HKL now clips management fees (c. 0.5–1% of AUM p.a.) plus performance optionality on an S$8B base, creating recurring, higher‑multiple earnings more akin to a listed GP than a traditional landlord. • 🔍 For finance professionals, HKL is morphing from a sleepy value trap into a structure-led rerating story: NAV validation, fee-income scalability, capital recycling, and a credible AUM growth path all lining up at once. 🧭 Alpha Binwani Capital sees Hongkong Land’s strategic pivot as directly bullish for the stock, which trades in US dollars, because it attacks the persistent 25–55% NAV discount that has weighed on shares for years. • 🏦 By demonstrating that private buyers — from Keppel REIT to sovereign wealth funds and pensions — are willing to pay full price for core assets, the market is being forced to reassess how deeply it discounts HKL’s balance sheet. • 💵 A meaningful slice of that capital is flowing into share buybacks, recently upsized by US$150 million and extended through end‑2026, turning HKL itself into a consistent, price‑sensitive buyer of its own deeply discounted equity. #HongkongLand #SCPREF #RealEstatePrivateEquity #SingaporeCBD

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Enhancing investor protection is necessary - but strengthening investor rights must be calibrated carefully to avoid unintended consequences for market integrity. Pleased to have contributed perspectives as an SGListCos council member to Jeffery Tan, MSID-SRAD 陳英雄’s Business Times article. Do take a moment to read the full article.

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One Asset. Two Stories. The 2026 Playbook? In 2026, some consultants are refining a very interesting strategy. Use one narrative for buyers. Use the opposite narrative for sellers. Close both sides. Take Tanjong Rhu area in Singapore as an example. To Buyers: “Large layouts you’ll never get again. Mature estate. Lifestyle value. Strong community. Yes, it’s 30 years old — but that’s quality and space you can’t replicate today.” To Sellers: “It’s 30 years old. Lease decay becomes psychological between 30–40 years. Value compression starts. You should consider rotating into freehold or newer stock.” Both arguments can be valid, depending on the objective. The problem arises when the objective isn’t the client’s. It’s the transaction. In 2026, that approach becomes dangerous. Buyers are data-driven. Costs are high. Stamp duties are significant. Liquidity matters. Real advisory means using the same framework on both sides: • What is the exit? • What is the liquidity depth? • Who buys from you next? • What happens in five years? Because in the end, my rule is simple: If you can’t sell it in five years, you shouldn’t be buying it today. One asset. One framework. One consistent philosophy. That’s the real business plan for 2026.

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This 3.8% is as of end March 2025 and is a real return in usd. Adding back annualized inflation in USA from 2005 to 2025, GIC has stated their nominal return in usd terms as 5.7%. Now this compares pretty ok with a 60%/40% Acwi/agg portfolio benchmark which would return about 6%. But it does lose out significantly to a 60/40 spy/agg portfolio which would return closer to 8%. One can argue perhaps could have allocated more to tech, less to Europe or more to USA but I think matching world index benchmark with costs added in is quite ok. ESP since it’s done with less volatility. Having said that, we should always challenge our asset managers to optimize better for the future. The returns last 10 years is a lot weaker and is worrying as 10 years is not a short time. Imagine if 10 years ago we actively shifted towards more equity, or towards tech, or towards USA or hedged some USDSGD opportunistically. Just one of these moves would have added billions to our coffers by now. Other large funds, swf did just that so we could have done that too. Finally, seeing it from the pov of paying for the 4% cpf in sgd terms, over 20 years, sgd strengthen by 25% against usd. So if gic thinks in sgd base, the nominal return drops to 4.3%. Still sufficient to pay for the cpf interest. Also to note, 1+% annualized loss does mean it may not be worth a currency hedge the entire time. Perhaps, it’s timely to now start a conscious strategy to handle the decline of usd environment. Esp since it’s possible that buying power may no longer be purely measured in usd in the mid term future. As for Temasek 8% TSR in usd terms, it’s much tricker to benchmark their returns as it’s not straightforward PE comparable. They have a lot of chunky ownership of glc. If must benchmark, then as a 100% equity fund, they are beating acwi 7.14% but under performing spy 10.13% for sure. To me their main challenge is they have to learn to operate glc well beyond just a governance role. Be active and inject more accountability to glc mgmt to deliver results. Many more dbs, sea, sia, keppels wanted pls! That way Temasek will continue to play a big positive role in sg economy. Nb: it is right on one level to say we just want to meet our own mandate over the long term. But i think we should challenge ourselves to do better and benchmark to global indexes as a KPI in addition to meeting mandate as priority. This will help stretch the active mgrs to deliver alpha as a sub goal within the main goal of meeting mandate. It’s quite likely this system will generate better strategic moves too as they focus on benchmarks too. (Opinion post as a citizen. All data from chatGPT or online etf calculators. Any error pls let me know. Edited once to reflect correct date range) https://bt.sg/4nGbZ

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Five companies now control 90% of Singapore's asset management market. UOB just gave up trying to compete with them. Ignites Asia, a Financial Times publication, asked me to comment on AllianzGI's S$555mn takeover of UOB Asset Management. A couple of my comments made the piece. But there's more in my full response that didn't make the article, and I think Board directors need to see it. Here's the part that should worry every Board overseeing a bank-owned or founder-led asset manager in Asia. Gerard Lee, former CEO of Lion Global Investors, put a number on it: BlackRock, Vanguard, JPMorgan AM, State Street & Amundi now control 90% of the addressable market in Singapore. Everyone else fights over the remaining 10%. DBS sold its asset management arm back in 2010. UOB just did the same. Even the biggest banks in Southeast Asia can't out-scale global giants in fund manufacturing anymore. Why this matters at the Board table, and who it applies to: 🔹 BOARDS of BANK-OWNED or INSURER-OWNED ASSET MANAGERS: Is running your own funds still core to your strategy, or is the real value now in selling and advising on them? UOB chose to stop running its own funds and focus on selling and advising instead. What’s the right call for your business model? 🔹 BOARDS of LOCAL or REGIONAL FUND HOUSES COMPETING ON 'LOCAL EXPERTISE': that edge is thinner than it looks. AI and machine learning are starting to replicate what used to take a 15-person team covering local bonds or Singapore-dollar equities. If this is increasingly a scale business, as I said in the article, what's your actual moat? 🔹 BOARDS of FINANCIAL HUBS, REGULATORS, or INSTITUTIONS WEIGHING OPEN ARCHITECTURE: Singapore and Hong Kong let global players compete with almost no restriction. Taiwan requires local presence & caps new fund approvals, and only allows one or two new funds per manager. One path builds a bigger, more competitive hub. The other protects local industry, at the cost of scale. Which trade-off is your institution making, and does your Board know it's making one? This deal isn't really about AllianzGI. It's a signal that scale, not geography, decides who survives in asset management now. MY OWN VIEW: Boards that treat this as "someone else's problem" because they're not in asset management are missing the point. The same scale logic is playing out in insurance, private banking, and wealth advisory across Asia right now. If your Board hasn't discussed where you sit on that curve, that conversation is overdue. 🔔 Follow me Ooi Keong LEE, for more on Board governance, risk management, and what's actually happening in Asia's financial services industry. #BoardGovernance #AssetManagement #RiskManagement #SoutheastAsia

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