U.S. stocks ended an up-and-down session slightly lower, weighed down by worries over virus variants and hurdles to a fresh aid package. Futures on the Nasdaq 100 Index jumped afterhours following a strong earnings report from Microsoft Corp.

The S&P 500 dropped just over 0.1% on an uneventful day at the index level. Below the surface, sentiment continued to be driven in large part by the retail trading set. GameStop Corp.rallied another 92%, while Pitney Bowes Inc. jumped more than 80% after a comparison to the video-game retailer. Small-caps were among the worst performers as traders turned away from bets on an end to Covid lockdowns.

Suntec Real Estate Investment Trust (Suntec Reit) posted on Tuesday a 3.7 per cent fall in distribution per unit (DPU) to 2.261 Singapore cents for the fourth quarter compared with 2.347 cents for the year-ago period. Gross revenue fell 12 per cent at S$165.9 million for H2, compared to S$188.7 million a year ago. This was due to a fall in rental income, most significantly from its office and retail properties such as Suntec Singapore, for which revenue fell by 65.9 per cent.

Keppel Data Centre (DC) Reit on Tuesday reported a distribution per unit (DPU) of 4.795 Singapore cents for the second half of the fiscal year ended December 2020, 27.5 per cent higher than the DPU of 3.76 Singapore cents paid out in the year-ago period. This lifted the Reit's DPU for FY 2020 to 9.17 Singapore cents, some 20.5 per cent higher than the distribution of 7.61 Singapore cents in FY 2019.

City Developments Limited (CDL) has been ranked the world's top real estate company on the Global 100 most sustainable corporations in the world, and takes the 40th place on the whole index which ranks the world's most sustainable corporations. Announced virtually on Monday at the 17th Annual Global 100 Launch, CDL has also remained Singapore's top-ranked most sustainable company in the world, a position held for the third consecutive year.

Eligible Sheng Siong staff will receive total bonuses of up to 16 months, inclusive of the annual wage supplement (AWS) for 2020, with the supermarket operator having raised the variable bonus to 20 per cent of the company's profits before tax, Today reported. In an internal staff memo sent out last week, the company said that the bumper bonus was to recognise that the company had "performed extremely well as compared to previous years" in 2020, on the back of elevated demand for its offerings due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Medtech firm Biolidics on Monday launched a Covid-19 antigen test kit which can be marketed and sold in the European Union (EU). The raw materials of the antigen test kit, named ClearEpi SARS-CoV-2 Antigen Rapid Test Kit (ClearEpi ART), are sourced from JOYSBIO (Tianjin) Biotechnology Co, which Biolidics has a distribution agreement with. The kits are packaged and labelled by third-party manufacturers.

Source: SGX Masnet, The Business Times, Bloomberg, Channel NewsAsia, Reuters, PSR