The Singapore Exchange is about to make life easier for listed companies — at least the safer ones.
The bourse’s regulatory arm plans to end quarterly earnings reporting requirements that apply to all companies with a market capitalization of at least S$75 million (US$56 million), Singapore Exchange Regulation (SGX RegCo) chief executive officer Tan Boon Gin (陳文仁) said.
When the rule change takes effect on Feb. 7, only riskier companies would need to report earnings every three months, Tan said at a news conference.
SGX RegCo is also to tighten other disclosure rules and introduce a new whistle-blower policy as part of efforts to protect investors, Tan added.
Other global exchanges have moved away from mandating quarterly reporting for all of their companies. The EU ended its requirement in 2013, while the Hong Kong Stock Exchange only applies the rule to companies on its small-cap exchange. The US Securities and Exchange Commission is reviewing the issue.
“Internationally, there’s a shift away from quarterly reporting and this is to allow companies to focus on the long term,” Tan said.
About 75 percent of the Singapore market reports on a quarterly basis, SGX RegCo said.
Under Singapore’s new policy, a listed company would have to report each quarter when it receives a qualified report from its auditors, or when they express concern about the company as a going concern.
The requirement can also be imposed if SGX RegCo has regulatory concerns about a company regarding disclosure breaches.
Despite the new rules, most larger companies, including banks, would likely continue reporting on a quarterly basis, National University of Singapore associate professor Mak Yuen Teen (麥潤田) said.
“When a source of information disappears, investors will use other sources as proxies, like analyst reports, and these will be less accurate,” he said.
SGX RegCo said that the quarterly reporting requirements would apply to about 100 companies when the rules change. It plans to make the list public.
Other Singapore-listed companies would need to report semiannually, though the exchange would “encourage” them to provide business updates on a more regular basis, Tan said.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by