Singapore Telecommunications Ltd, Asia's fifth-largest phone company, said on July 23 that it was planning to sell off three property sites. This would allow SingTel, Singapore's largest listed firm, to divest non-core assets and generate cash to be channelled back into its main telecoms business, it said.
Majority government-owned SingTel said it recently received provisional permission from the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) to redevelop two properties, located in central and western Singapore.
One of the properties houses a cable store and the other is used as a training centre. Approval for a third site, also located in the western part of the city-state, was obtained in 2003.
"Changes in technology have offered opportunities for us to consolidate our facilities such as telephone exchanges," SingTel spokesman Peter Heng said in an emailed statement.
"The recent planning approvals to redevelop two properties give us more options to divest non-core assets so as to free up cash resources to channel back into our core business."
Facing a mature home market, where over nine in 10 people own a cellphone, SingTel has spent about S$17 billion ($10 billion) in recent years buying operators in high-growth Asian nations with fewer cellphone users, and in the bigger Australian market.
It now derives more than 70 percent of group revenues and two-thirds of pretax earnings from operations outside Singapore.
Comments
Comments are closed.