AT the end of last month, tycoon Robert Kuok Hock Nien was in the news twice. This is novel, considering that the billionaire Malaysia’s richest individual with an estimated net worth of US$11.6 billion (RM50.7 billion) by Forbes magazine is very low key. On April 29, the government announced the approval of five .
The industry is already running on massive losses due to low occupancy rates throughout 2020 until now.
Compounding matters is that there is little visibility in sight of when movement and travel bans will be lifted due to the third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic resulting from new highly transmissible and airborne variants.
Like many businesses that face challenging times, mergers and acquisitions deals involving hotels are popping up as owners opt to sell out rather than incur more losses. Meanwhile opportunistic buyers with fat wallets are scouring the scene.
Listings of hotels for sale in Malaysia have jumped 40% year-to-date due to rising interest from both local and overseas investors, says Previndran Singhe of Zerin Properties, adding that prices for hotel properties have dropped by as much as 35% as compared to pre-lockdown times.
EIGHT of Malaysia’s top 10 richest tycoons based on Forbes’ 2020 billionaires list earned a whopping RM1.99 billion worth of dividends from the recently announced financial results for the quarter ended Dec 31, 2020, according to their known shareholdings in Bursa Malaysia-listed firms.
Among them, Public Bank Bhd founder Tan Sri Dr Teh Hong Piow is expected to receive the biggest dividend payout totalling RM668.18 million from his shareholdings in the bank and insurer LPI Capital Bhd.
Public Bank, the third-largest banking group in the country by asset size, declared an interim dividend of 13 sen (payable on March 22) for the fourth quarter of financial year 2020 (4QFY2020) ended Dec 31, 2020. Public Bank also undertook a four-for-one bonus share issue to reward shareholders last year, which enlarged the number of Public Bank’s outstanding shares to 4.2 billion.