A race in Singapore to buy property ahead of the Singaporean government’s latest price cooling measures could give a temporary boost to DBS Group Holdings Ltd’s mortgage business, but in the longer term, the market is likely to slow down, DBS said.
The country’s largest bank said it expects “a slight ramp-up in mortgage financing requirements” in the next one or two months, as a result of a July 5 rush to purchase apartments before the government measures took effect, DBS Singapore country head Sim S. Lim (林森成) said.
About 1,000 condominium units were sold that evening in the hours between the government’s announcement of a new property clampdown and the midnight deadline when the curbs took effect, the Straits Times reported.
Singapore imposed higher stamp duties and tougher borrowing limits in a bid to cool speculative demand stoked by record land bids and redevelopment deals.
“These people who bought 1,000 units will be looking for mortgage financing,” Lim said in an interview yesterday.
After that demand has been satisfied, the mortgage market would cool, although discounts from property developers would mitigate the downturn, Lim said.
The effect on DBS would also be cushioned by the nature of the bank’s customer base, which includes purchasers of government-subsidized housing and first-time buyers, Lim added.
Separately, economists said that aging demographics and rising labor costs would weigh on the city-state, which has focused on a significant manufacturing sector to support growth.
Singapore stands out against a landscape of emerging Asia cities that are relying more and more on services to juice growth, an Oxford Economics Ltd research note said on Wednesday.
“The days when Singapore’s manufacturing competitiveness was self-evidently great are long over,” Oxford Economics said. “Singapore’s manufacturing sector faces both rising competition within the region and a risk of rising labor costs” from an aging population and immigration restrictions.
While they predict “modest” growth in manufacturing productivity through 2022, the Oxford economists said that the sector’s employment would flat-line and exports would probably grow in line with world trade instead of outperforming.
The Oxford report follows a note earlier this week from analysts at DBS, outlining the longer-term challenges.
Singapore would be “good, but no longer distinctive” through 2030, with unfavorable demographics holding down growth at about 2 to 2.5 percent, said the DBS note, which was led by chief economist Taimur Baig.
That compares with an average 7.9 percent growth per year from this year to 2022 forecast for Ho Chi Minh City by Oxford economists.
The city’s financial services are estimated to rise 10.6 percent, and transportation and communications 8.5 percent over the same period.
On the positive side, Baig and the DBS analysts said that they see growth-cushioning factors from the Singaporean government’s healthy appetite for cutting-edge technologies, and in the potential to increase the share of exports to neighbors in the region, which has remained at about 20 percent for the past 15 years.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last