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Boustead Singapore, cimb maintains HOLD with TP S$1.06 (from S$1.57)
=Not spared from a downcycle
=At 22% of our full-year forecast, Boustead’s 1QFY3/16 core net profit was deemed below our expectations as we expect poorer earnings outlook in the remaining year. We cut FY16-18 core EPS estimates by 19.6%-27.4% in view of 1) the protracted challenging business environment for its energy division and 2) the subdued profitability of the geospatial technology division due to the weakened A$ versus the US$. While we continue to like Boustead for its sound financial position and core engineering capability, we need some meaningful catalysts to re-rate the stock. We maintain a Hold rating on Boustead, with a lower target price of S$1.06, based on a 25% holding company discount to its FY3/16 SOP valuation (previously a 10% discount).
=1Q16 financial results highlights
=Adjusted for the 48.8% demerger of Boustead Projects (BP), Boustead’s 1Q16 revenue declined by 8% yoy and core net profit by 13.8% yoy on broad-based weaknesses. Pre-tax profit for the real estate, energy and geospatial divisions fell by 22%, 62% and 33%, respectively. While the challenges for real estate and energy have been well-guided, we highlight the dip in revenue (-11% yoy) and margin (18% vs. 20%+ previously) for the geospatial division due to the weakened A$ against US$ and S$. Boustead’s current order book stands at a relatively healthy level of S$344m (real estate: S$214m; energy: S$130m).
=Business environment remains challenging
=Management guides for a cautious business outlook, as headwinds from China and Europe could have an adverse impact on the industries that the group serves. Delays are expected for the award of sizeable contracts from global oil & gas industries. Future gross margins are likely to be affected due to stiffer competition for contracts, though cost management measures have been put in place to partially mitigate the impact. In addition, the geospatial division may stay subdued by the weak A$, which tends to correlate with China’s economy.
=Sound financial position
=We believe that the sound financial position could help Boustead to navigate the downcycle with flexibility. Excluding those parked under the separately listed BP, Boustead has zero debt, S$136m cash and S$40m available-for-sale financial assets as at end-1Q16. The cash could be earmarked for potential M&As when the right opportunity emerges.

Re-vested using my 'dumb' money after i fully divested 2 years back. The price has come back close to my purchase price back in 2011. I was thinking, does it pay to become a long term shareholder especially in cyclical companies?

I remember Peter Lynch mentioned that it is better to time your entry and exit in cyclical companies based on where they are in the cycle.

Market timing may not be the first thing that come to the mind of typical value investors, but it is starting to make some sense to me.

(21-08-2015, 09:23 AM)Bibi Wrote: [ -> ]Re-vested using my 'dumb' money after i fully divested 2 years back. The price has come back close to my purchase price back in 2011. I was thinking, does it pay to become a long term shareholder especially in cyclical companies?

Dividends can be collected along the way while stay invested

• Does ESRI fit in in anyway especially since they are so big...
  
• Sep 26 2015 at 12:15 AM 
   
  
  
•  Updated Sep 26 2015 at 12:15 AM 
  

The smart way to short circuit a city's problems

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Smart cities don't need to be the futuristic visions they are frequently made out to be.They can also make the present better, writes Michael Bleby.

NaN of
[img=620x0]http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/j/u/w/k/d/image.related.afrArticleLead.620x350.gjtr8h.png/1443162228131.jpg[/img]The SAHMRI medical research building in Adelaide is drawing back high-quality staff who had previously left the city. David Mariuz
[Image: 1426320577108.png]

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by Michael Bleby
 
Wednesday, 8am. It's time to go to work, but first you check your phone.
The traffic app, which gives a reading based on traffic flows, weather and public transport timetables, has good news.
"If you delay your departure another 10 minutes, you're going to get into work 15 minutes earlier," it says.

You pour that second cup of coffee and only after that walk out the door. 
The combination of big-data processing of multiple streams of data and portable devices that connect people digitally is creating new ways for people to use the physical environment and for infrastructure to better serve their needs. Think of it as similar to how we now use Google Maps to give us traffic information aggregated from drivers, but multiplied across virtually every interaction and movement you have across your city.
That's a glimpse – none too far away – of how a so-called "smart city" could feature in your life: a city in which small pockets of valuable information are mined deep to uncover massive efficiencies. The next great natural resource may well be digital rather than physical.  
It's an idea that also appears to be front of mind for newly minted Prime Minster Malcolm Turnbull. A year ago, while still Communications Minister, he told the ParraConnect Smart City Forum that cities needed to become "more like humans and less like cars". Last Sunday, when he unveiled his cabinet for the "21st century" he broke with tradition and created a federal Minister for Cities and the Built Environment and gave the job to Jamie Briggs.


"Historically, the federal government has had a limited engagement with cities, and yet that is where most Australians live," Turnbull said.
WHERE MOST OF THE ECONOMY HAPPENS
Cities are where most of the economy happens. Last year, in fact, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide collectively accounted for almost two-thirds of gross domestic product. Sydney alone represented 22.6 per cent, Melbourne 17.7 per cent, Perth 9.6 per cent, Brisbane 9.5 per cent and Adelaide 4.7 per cent.
"If you've got one word to describe what this new portfolio's about, it's the economy," Briggs tells AFR Weekend. "So much of our GDP is driven from a 20 kilometre radius of our major cities, which is a great starting point, but we can do more to make that even better in the future."

But the way things stand, those assets are at risk.
As the country's population rises an expected 37 per cent to 30.5 million by 2031 from 22.3 million in 2011, the population of the four largest cities: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, are projected to jump about 45 per cent – or 5.8 million – from 12.8 million to 18.6 million, the government body, Infrastructure Australia says.
Without more investment in infrastructure to support larger populations and without more efficient management of existing infrastructure, the productivity of cities will be choked. Car travel times could more than double in the worst areas. Demand for public transport – in terms of passenger kilometres travelled – will rise an average 89 per cent across all capital cities.
In Sydney, that demand will rise 55 per cent. In sprawling Melbourne – and this shows why denser living is more sustainable – public transport kilometres travelled will more than double, with a 121 per cent increase. 

As the inaugural cities minister Jamie Briggs has the job of plugging Australia's $700 billion-odd deficit between the infrastructure it has and what it needs. There's a long wish list – the $4.5-billion Brisbane's Cross River Rail, which will build 10 kilometres of line and four stations underground between Yeerongpilly and Victoria Park; the $11 billion Melbourne Metro rail project that would also boost the capacity of the city's commuter trains by tunnelling under the CBD.
In Sydney, the raft of projects already under way are being funded by the earlier ports privatisation, while the planned ones will be funded by the sale of the state-owned electricity distribution network. But there's always a need for more money.  
But the debate is no longer just about how to fund and prioritise new infrastructure. Smart cities are very much about using their existing infrastructure and facilities more efficiently, to make them better and easier places to live.
"The smartest thing we can do is have cities which attract people to either stay in Australia or to come to Australia," Briggs says.
One example of that is the SAHMRI building in Briggs' home town of Adelaide. The advanced medical research building has already started down that path by drawing back high-quality staff who had previously left the city.
Next month, another example of that comes to life. The Goods Line, a pedestrian and cycle way built on the site of a disused freight rail path, will be formally launched. Modelled on New York's successful High Line, it will offer a new commuter corridor from Central Station to Darling Harbour. 
The notion of a Smart City has a long evolution, with The Guardian arguing it dates back at least to the installation of the first automated traffic light in Houston in 1922. But the use of technology and information to make daily tasks like commuting and working easier got a big boost from IT companies such as Cisco Systems and IBM that have poured money into the idea.
The potential sounds boundless. One often-touted dimension of Smart Cities is the so-called Internet of Things, in which individual items have IP addresses and can be controlled by automation and apps – even by the light emitted by infrastructure such as street lamps.
But caution is needed on the overblown rhetoric, says Martin Stewart-Weeks, himself a former Cisco director and now a consultant in policy, innovation and technology.
"The instrumentation and automation strand [of the smart city debate] threatens to somewhat – as technology often does – overwhelm what one calls the human element and misses the point," Stewart-Weeks says. "The point is that in the end, cities only work if they work for people and don't work because you can instrument and automate them."
They're a sexy notion that excites politicians – Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year said his country would build 100 smart cities – but people can lose perspective. Adam Greenfield of the LSE Cities think-tank criticises the tendency to throw the civic baby out with the technological bathwater.
"It is one thing, after all, to reinforce the basic infrastructures that undergird the quality of urban life everywhere; quite another to propose saddling India's cities with expensive, untested technology at a time when reliable access to electricity, clean drinking water or safe sanitary facilities remain beyond reach for too many,"Greenfield writes.
Songdo, a masterplanned Smart City 15 minutes' drive from Seoul's Incheon airport was built, rather than retrofitted, with smart technology, including sensors in the roads and water, waste and electricity systems to respond the movements of residents but it isn't necessarily a nice, or populous place to be.

MAKING EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE BETTER
But to bring it back to the infrastructure, the smart city notion does mean using technology to make existing infrastructure better. In one case in Wales, for example, engineering firm Arup used mobile phone data to understand how individuals started their journey and ended their journey and the route they took. 
It then used that aggregated data to understand how the different components of the local transport system – feeder roads, highways, trains and taxis – could be organised to better match the needs of commuters given the journeys they were making. It marked a big change from the assumption-laden methods traditionally employed.
"What have you got? You've got a city that is able to be connected to your world and make itself relevant to you at a time and a place that's important for you, but important for those operating that particular business," says Greg Stone, consulting firm Arup's Digital Services Leader and the former chief technology officer at Microsoft Australia. "You can't do that unless you bring those things together in a way that's very human-centric."
Australia has never been good at bringing those things together. The federation that evolved out of individual colonies and in which responsibilities are still dispersed between the local, state and federal layers of government is poorly equipped to co-ordinate policy, let alone such diverse considerations as housing, transport, education and health.
There have been some steps to change things. The former Labor government created a Major Cities Unit to guide planning policy and its last report – written before it was disbanded by former prime minister Tony Abbott – painted the worrying picture of a growing geographic divide between those who had access to jobs and opportunities and those who didn't.
But the conservative side of politics was little interested in cities and the Liberal Party's coalition with the rural-based National Party ensured it stayed that way. There were some efforts – as far back as 2011 environment minister Greg Hunt was arguing for integrated planning commissions to coordinate development in each of the capital cities – but they never affected policy.
Cities are now impossible to ignore, as the urbanist Prime Minister married to the former Sydney lord mayor, Lucy Turnbull, emphasised when he appointed Briggs this week. The challenge of housing alone makes it necessary – at least nine out of every 10 people live in cities and overseeing the policies to make this work are crucial.
"We've got an extraordinary urbanisation for such a large country, but the density in cities is something that has never really taken off in Australia," Briggs says. "Density is going to be the big challenge here."
But while leaders will still make crucial decisions about policy and about how money is spent, information takes away any guesswork. In the smart city-era, the experts can opine, but the needs of the people can actually be proven with data. 
Planners already know, for example, that people living in poorer areas spend relatively more time and money travelling to work. But the analysis of large disparate data sets gives the ability to know more and respond to it.
"What we might be able to do with big data is see what skills they have, what jobs they're going to and how we can relocate some of those so they're closer to where the people with those skills live, so we can reduce the journey to work time and improve public transport links between their work and where they live," says Sue Holliday, the professor of planning practice at UNSW and a former director general of planning in NSW. "Maybe we can target training in specific parts of Sydney?"
DATA FOR THE PEOPLE
But people need to be able to use that data themselves, says Scott Holmes, Western Sydney University's deputy vice-chancellor for research and development.
"The real big issue in communities and in getting people to buy into a debate about what they want in cities is to let them play with the data," Holmes says.
The university gives all of its 44,000 students an iPad or similar device and encourages them to provide data to a local research centre it has created, the Centre for Western Sydney.
"You can actually get pictures of communities so you get to make decisions about infrastructure facilities," Holmes says. "What if you want to open a business? You're thinking of having another dry cleaner in Lidcombe? You can do that research yourself."
Holmes hypothecates that such a person could gather data about public transport services past a given site in Lidcombe, as well as pedestrian traffic and demographics – to know how many professional workers were in the area with suits to clean. Making that data usable – putting it into a form that anyone can use – is a longer-term goal of the centre.
But so-called data visualisation is already happening. In last year's GovHack – an event sponsored by the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre that permits groups to manipulate open government data – one group of hackers analysed the data from electronic ticket use in the city to plot the 16-million journeys made in march and april 2014.
They produced a series of heatmaps showing transport use, including difficult journeys between suburbs that were close but poorly connected by transport and subsequently presented them to the state departments of transport and planning and the Public Transport Authority, which had provided the raw data.
"We set out to create a project that would assist government with decision making," says Onno Benschop, one of the participants. "This is the beginning of what we might call a symbiotic relationship with the ultimate aim to improve society and have fun along the way."
Data is valuable and the manipulation of large volumes of it carries privacy risks that need to be recognised and mitigated, Arup's Stone warns.
"With all of these things, there's a balance point where the user needs to be in control to the tune that they feel comfortable," he says. "The reality is we're exploring all this stuff. These are dangers that need to be understood."
But done right, smart cities don't need to be the futuristic visions they are frequently made out to be. They can just make the present better.
"This is about all the things happening in a city on a daily basis – ambulances sitting for six hours outside hospitals, the drug-related crime rates," Holmes says. "A smart city responds to the information that's impacting on its ability to be a liveable place."

Esri is just a software, athough I must say it is widely used. Smart cities... are far more than that. It is a system of systems.

Well, smart cities is my bread and butter because i did consulting work on it.. even to chinese cities!

Attached are Boustead Analysis by CIMB on 12 Aug 15. 

Just check with fellow buddies, Boustead projects are listed on 30 Apr 15?  Are Boustead Projects listed with its shares distributed to existing shareholders or Boustead Singapore remains as parent company?

(05-10-2015, 09:41 AM)butcher Wrote: [ -> ]Attached are Boustead Analysis by CIMB on 12 Aug 15. 

Just check with fellow buddies, Boustead projects are listed on 30 Apr 15?  Are Boustead Projects listed with its shares distributed to existing shareholders or Boustead Singapore remains as parent company?

BP was listed via a dividend in specie, that is, the shares are distributed to the shareholders of Boustead Singapore.
But Boustead Singapore remains the majority shareholder of BP (51%)
(did not distribute all 100% of BP)

Thank you GFG

http://boustead.listedcompany.com/news.html/id/493366

140,200 out of total mkt vol of 189,500

I think at these levels, the buying makes more sense though how long is this tunnel is anyone's guess

Vested
GG