DBS Group Holdings Ltd (星展銀行) said it expects the COVID-19 outbreak to hurt revenue slightly this year as it unveiled steps to alleviate its impact on small businesses and home owners.
Assuming the outbreak is controlled by the summer, the virus would impact revenue by about 1 to 2 percent, chief executive officer Piyush Gupta said in a presentation yesterday after Singapore’s biggest bank posted higher fourth-quarter profit.
DBS is one of the first major Asian banks to flag the risks to earnings from the virus. The outbreak has penetrated the bank, where an employee at its Singapore headquarters was diagnosed with the disease earlier this week, prompting it to send 300 workers home.
In line with lenders in Hong Kong and Singapore that are helping clients during a virus-hit economic slowdown, DBS is offering a six-month debt moratorium on principal repayments for property loans extended to small and medium-sized businesses in Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as on mortgage loans for retail clients in Singapore, it said.
United Overseas Bank Ltd (大華銀行), a local smaller rival, has allocated S$3 billion (US$2.16 billion) of “relief assistance” to Singaporean companies aimed at addressing near-term liquidity, it said on Wednesday.
Policymakers around the world are assessing the potential economic hit from the virus, which has already disrupted travel, commerce and manufacturing throughout Asia. Singapore is bracing for a tourism slump that DBS economists say might wipe 0.5 percentage point off this year’s growth.
For DBS, the impact is not confined to the domestic market: More than a quarter of its revenue comes from Greater China, including Hong Kong.
DBS posted fourth-quarter profit that climbed 14 percent to S$1.51 billion, led by income from lending and wealth management. That compared with the S$1.49 billion average estimate of five analysts surveyed. Full-year earnings also climbed 14 percent, to a record S$6.4 billion.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained