Investors hold their breath ahead of this Friday's Jackson Hole summit for any indications on whether the FED will offer more stimuli. It is possible that the FED won't reveal any come August 31st, preferring instead to wait for events in Europe to unfold, including the ESM legality ruling by the German constitutional court, before deciding whether to adopt more stimuli. Given the rise since early June, STI, in line with other regional equity indices, is taking a breather ahead of the developments that will unfold in coming weeks. Technically, we continue to see an initial pullback to 3000 (+/-15pts) or 2930 at worst.

Goodpack's 4QFY12 net profit of US$11.2m (-3% q-o-q, -5% y-o-y), was in line with expectations. Lift in synthetic rubber market share to 40% led to 12% rise in revenues but this was offset by higher costs. Delay in recovery of rubber demand results in FY13-15F earnings revised by -9% to +2%. With pick up in the rubber demand only a few months away (1QCY13) and expected total return of 17% (inclusive of 3% dividend yield), we maintain our BUY call, TP at S$2.00.

Raffles Educationis proposing to undertake a renounceable non-underwritten rights issue of up to 170.9m Rights Shares at an issue price of S$0.14 for each Rights Share, on the basis of one (1) Rights Share for every five (5) existing Shares held. The Issue Price of S$0.14 represents a discount of more than 60% from the last traded price. The net proceed of up to about S$23.7m is intended for the repayment of loans, investment in education institutions and general working capital purposes.

Great Eastern Holdings plans to sell a 25% stake in a China joint venture to Chongqing City Construction Investment Group for RMB303m. The sale paves the way for future expansion of branch network through further localisation.

Scorpio East Holdingsis placing out 25m shares at the price of S$0.065 each. The subscription price represents a discount of approximately 9.72% to last weighted average price. The Placement is undertaken to strengthen the working capital of the company.

Our economist has lowered Singapore full year GDP growth forecast for 2012 to 2.5%, from 3.0% previously. And against the rising global uncertainties and fading externaldemand, downside risk to headline GDP growth will most likely continue to escalate. As such, GDP forecast for 2013 has also shaved to 3.7%, from 4.3%.

Development charge (DC) rates are set to increase from Sept 1 for non-landed residential use, say property consultants. This is based on land sales in the past six months at prices above land values implied by prevailing DC rates. Most also forecast higher DC for industrial use, again citing winning land bids at state tenders. However, rates are predicted to remain either flat or increase only slightly for landed residential and commercial use.

A site at Plot 3 Tampines Industrial Crescent received four bids at the close of the Industrial Government Land Sales programme, with a top bid of $55m, or $77.47 psf ppr. The top bid, submitted by Oxley Bliss, beat the second-highest bid of $36.3m, or $51.11 psf ppr, which was put in by Soilbuild Group Holdings. The site, which has an area of 3.88 ha, has a lease of 30 years, with a maximum permissible gross plot ratio of 1.7, and is zoned B2.

Source: DBSV