Uni-Asia Group Limited

Singapore · Shipping & property investment

SGX: CHJ · Information cut-off 28 August 2026

28 August monitoring update. The 14 August EGM represented 18,163,921 shares and approved the Uni Harmony acquisition with 100% of votes cast in favour. Written answers explain the ten-year-old vessel, independent valuation, proposed charter and co-investment rationale. This adds governance detail but no new completion or financing event. SGX announcement and attachments. (R/D)

What the company is

Uni-Asia earns money in four economically distinct ways, and the distinction is the most important thing on this page:

1. Ship owning and chartering. Nine handysize and supramax bulk carriers, 36,861–57,836 dwt, all Japanese-built, carried at US$145.0m at 30 June 2026. Revenue is hire days multiplied by the daily charter rate.
2. Maritime asset management. Originating and structuring ship investments for co-investors, arranging Japanese non-recourse and sale-and-leaseback financing, and taking administration and arrangement fees. Segment assets at 30 June 2026: US$1.9m.
3. Maritime services. Commercial and technical ship management and brokerage. Currently loss-making.
4. Japan property. The ALERO small-residential development programme in Tokyo, held through Tokumei Kumiai silent partnerships; plus a fee franchise at Uni-Asia Capital (Japan) covering five municipal PFI concessions and asset management of 20 group homes for people with disabilities under a JPY 2.975bn social project bond.

A fifth business — hotels in Japan — was the group's largest revenue line for a decade and was deconsolidated in FY2020 with a US$24.4m gain, taking about US$81m of annual revenue with it.

Registered name history matters for anyone searching the filings: Uni-Asia Finance Corporation (Cayman) to FY2013, Uni-Asia Holdings Limited to FY2016, and Uni-Asia Group Limited (Singapore, Co. Reg. 201701284Z) from the January 2017 Cayman scheme of arrangement.

Where the profit sits, and where the capital sits

These are not the same place, and the segment note says so plainly. Segment result is struck at profit before tax — after depreciation, finance costs and the Tokumei Kumiai allocation — and the segment rows sum to group PBT in every period from FY2016 to 1H2026.

Caution on maritime asset management. Its 32%-of-profit-on-0.9%-of-assets is not a recurring fee annuity. Asked at the 30 April 2026 AGM why the segment jumped, the Executive Director attributed it to “gains from vessel disposals, including the partial disposal of jointly owned vessels classified under Maritime Asset Management” and to completed transaction fees, adding that “such income is inherently non-recurring and dependent on deal activity”. The notes agree: the recurring asset-management-and-administration fee line fell 18% in FY2025 to US$2.228m, while arrangement and agency fees quadrupled to US$2.314m and realised shipping gains were US$3.412m — of which US$3.404m came from investee companies, i.e. the related-party joint-investment pool being wound down (AR2025 pp.145, 177). Separately, part of the segment’s apparent capital-lightness is a reclassification: from 1 January 2020 three wholly-owned ship subsidiaries moved out of it into ship owning, and restated FY2019 segment assets were US$5.4m, not the US$45.3m first reported (AR2020 p.115).

Source: 1H2026 unaudited condensed interim financial statements, note 4. Caution on segment liabilities: they include intra-group funding, which is removed in the eliminations column. The ex-Japan property segment's US$9.3m against US$1.5m of assets is therefore not evidence of an external claim of that size — the composition is not disclosed at segment level, and it is one of the open questions below.

The as-filed history since listing

No revenue series crosses FY2019/FY2020 without a break. The hotel deconsolidation took total income from US$136.0m to US$45.9m. Reported figures, US$'000:

Sources: annual reports FY2021–FY2025 and the results announcements of 28 Feb 2025, 26 Sep 2025, 26 Feb 2026 and 14 Aug 2026. The full nineteen-year series from FY2007 is in the workbook.

The FY2024 write-down was disclosed in three escalating steps before the result: a market update on 13 February 2025 stating the group "may not be able to recover all or any of its capital", a formal profit-guidance announcement on 21 February, and the result on 28 February.

Disclosed operating metrics and charter visibility

The issuer reports 1H2026 hire days and average daily charter rate in Appendix 7.2 of the interim statements, alongside charter income, vessel operating expenses, fleet count, selected forward fixtures and aggregate charter cover. Numerical utilisation, a complete forward rate path and a vessel-by-vessel charter ladder remain undisclosed.

Sources: 1H2026 unaudited condensed interim financial statements, Appendix 7.2 (physical PDF p.31 / internal p.29), and results presentation, 14 August 2026. Historical issuer KPIs are separated from analyst forecast assumptions.

The fleet, as at 31 March 2026

Source: Annual Report 2025, pp.19–25, and the four completion announcements. Dwt-weighted average age 10.6 years. MV Glengyle was renamed MV Uni Phoenix after the April 2025 collision and returned to service on 22 April 2026 — worth noting, because a reader comparing the FY2022 and FY2026 fleet tables without knowing that would conclude one vessel had been sold and another bought.

Three further vessels — Uni Harmony, Uni Blossom and Sider Montediprocida, each 37,700 dwt Imabari-built — are held as 18% joint investments. Five 29,000 dwt vessels were disposed of by FY2025, completing the group's exit from that size class.

Two newbuilds are on order: one 40,000 dwt eco-specification double-hull bulk carrier from Imabari's Shimanami yard for delivery in 2H2028 (announced 4 March 2026), and a second 40,000 dwt vessel for delivery between 4Q2029 and 1H2030 (announced 6 August 2026). Neither announcement disclosed a price; both state that no definitive financing had been arranged at the time of announcement. Vessel capital commitments were US$31.445m at 30 June 2026, against a US$1.655m deposit already paid.

What the fleet renewal cost, and who paid for it

US$’000, from the consolidated statements of cash flows in the FY2022, FY2024 and FY2025 annual reports. FY2023 is taken from the FY2024 report’s comparative column: the FY2023 annual report held in the research pack will not open — the file has no end-of-file marker — so the same audited figures are read from the following year’s accounts instead. The purchase line for FY2021 and FY2023 combines investments with investment property, which those years present on separate lines.

FY2025 spent US$84.6m on property, plant and equipment. The four preceding years together spent US$13.2m. The company’s own financial review attributes the figure mainly to the acquisition of four vessels during the year, and it landed in the one year of the five when operating cash flow was effectively nil — US$0.2m, against US$17.1m the year before and US$34.9m in FY2022. So the fleet renewal was not funded out of the fleet. It was funded by US$68.1m of new borrowings, which the review says were raised “mainly to fund ship and property investments”, and by US$8.0m of contributions from non-controlling interests — the first such contribution in the five years, and the company attributes it to new ship investments.

That single year reverses the direction of the whole period. Across FY2021 to FY2024 the group repaid US$129.7m of borrowings and drew US$60.4m, a net repayment in every one of the four years. FY2025 drew US$68.1m against US$25.8m repaid — a net draw of US$42.3m, which gave back 61% of the US$69.3m the group had paid down over the previous four years. The as-filed history above shows the consequence on the balance sheet: total borrowings fall from US$83.8m to US$41.6m over four years and then more than double back to US$87.4m in one.

The disposals partly offset it and are worth separating, because they are ships. FY2025 took in US$8.8m from the sale of MV Clearwater Bay and US$10.3m from MV Uni Challenge, both wholly-owned bulkers, against the four vessels bought. The group is not simply adding tonnage; it is turning the fleet over, and the cash cost of doing so in one year was roughly four times what it recovered from selling the old ships.

The dividend was cut before the capital programme, not because of it. US$6.5m went out in FY2022 and US$6.0m in FY2023, against FY2021’s and FY2022’s record profits. It then fell to US$1.9m and US$1.8m — a 72% cut — which follows the FY2024 loss rather than the FY2025 spending. FY2025’s US$1.8m comprised the FY2024 final and the FY2025 interim, and it was still nearly eight times that year’s operating cash flow.

Ownership, and who the group buys its ships from

The register has moved since that date

Six notifications filed under the Securities and Futures Act between 20 May and 16 July 2026 show a holder that does not appear in the annual report's table at all. Asparta Pte. Ltd. held 4.999% at 18 March 2026 — just under the disclosure threshold — crossed 5% on 19 May 2026, and kept buying:

Source: six SFA Form 3 notifications, 20 May to 16 Jul 2026; two filings dated 28 May 2026 replaced the 19 and 22 May notices with identical figures and are counted once. All acquisitions were on-market. The form records that Asparta is not a fund manager; the beneficial owner is not disclosed. 1,340,500 shares is roughly 34 days of the stock's average traded volume.

Over the same period Precious Shipping's deemed interest rose from 5.96% to 6.01% (26 June 2026, through Unity Ventures). Its Managing Director, Khalid Moinuddin Hashim, has sat on the board since 30 April 2025.

Recomputed float. Four holders — Yamasa 30.00%, Evergreen 8.95%, Asparta 6.70%, Precious Shipping 6.01% — now hold 51.7% between them. Excluding Asparta as a substantial shareholder takes the public float from the 53.56% disclosed at 18 March 2026 to approximately 46.8%. Listing Rule 723 requires a minimum 10% public float and is comfortably met.

Four of the nine vessels were acquired in FY2025 from special-purpose companies majority-owned by Yamasa, the 30% shareholder. The FY2025 related-party note records US$82.29m of property, plant and equipment acquired from investee companies. Each purchase was an interested-person transaction requiring shareholder approval, which is why the company held four extraordinary general meetings between January 2025 and August 2026.

The one transaction with a published valuation is instructive. For MV Uni Harmony (announced 29 July 2026), the group is paying US$20.53m against an independent open-market valuation range of US$19.95m to US$22.05m from Exeno Yamamizu Corporation dated 21 April 2026 — inside the lower half of the range. The seller, Quest Bulkship S.A., is 18% owned by the group and 82% owned by Yamasa.

The same announcement discloses something the group’s own accounts never break out: that vessel’s profit was US$0.41m in FY2023, US$0.72m in FY2024 and US$0.11m in FY2025 — on an asset valued at US$20.5m. The US$20.53m price sits 28% of the way up the US$19.95m–US$22.05m valuation range, i.e. in its lower half.

The announcement also carries a contingent exposure the balance sheet does not: the Company will be payment guarantor for up to US$12.32m of the seven-year bareboat financing if the financier requires it, with the four co-investors counter-indemnifying 44.4% (§2.7). The issuer sizes the whole transaction at US$17.33m, or 13.9% of latest audited NTA (§4.1). For comparison, the corporate guarantees on the 30 June 2026 balance sheet were US$1.7m.

How the register votes

At the annual general meeting of 30 April 2026, two routine mandates were defeated. The poll results are in the minutes filed on 28 May 2026:

Total votes cast were 45,398,149, or 57.8% of the 78,599,987 shares in issue. The votes against Resolution 11 are exactly 23,582,116 — Yamasa’s registered holding per the AR2025 substantial-shareholder table. Resolution 10, the interested-person-transaction mandate from which Yamasa was required to abstain, drew total votes of 21,816,033, which is 45,398,149 less 23,582,116 — confirming which block sits in Resolution 11’s “against” column. The Appendix 1 Q&A records that the same buyback mandate was also not carried at the extraordinary general meeting of 30 April 2025.

Recorded here as an as-filed fact with its arithmetic, which is what an evidence library is for. Readers can draw their own conclusions about what it means for a company trading below book.

Board and auditor

Khalid Moinuddin Hashim has been a non-independent non-executive director since 30 April 2025. He is Managing Director and a board member of Precious Shipping PCL of Bangkok — one of the largest handysize, supramax and ultramax owners in the world, with 40 ships and four on order — and Precious Shipping holds 5.96% of Uni-Asia (AR2025 pp.47–48). Asked at the 2026 AGM whether substantial shareholders contribute operationally, he stated there is no direct business collaboration between the two companies and no conflict of interest, and that he contributes expertise at board level. Unity Ventures, a wholly owned Precious Shipping subsidiary, has been adding on-market in small clips: 46,000 shares in March 2025 and 19,000 in June 2026, taking the group holding to 4,725,100 shares.

The auditor has changed twice in three years. Ernst & Young audited the group from 2008; KPMG from 28 April 2023; and RSM SG Assurance was appointed at the 30 April 2026 AGM (Resolution 8, carried 99.97%). The appendix to the AGM notice states that KPMG “indicated to the Company that it was not seeking re-appointment” for FY2026, that there were no disagreements on accounting treatments for FY2025, and that the change is expected to produce audit fee savings of approximately 15% “having regard to the Group’s financial performance over the last two financial years” (AR2025 p.194).

The accounting change that lands in FY2026

With effect from 1 January 2026, the group revised the estimated useful lives of its vessels from 20 years to 25 years, applied prospectively as a change in accounting estimate. The issuer states the decrease in depreciation expense "amounts to approximately US$4.1 million", which will instead be recognised over the extended lives in future years. Cash flow is unaffected.

The stated reasons are the operational condition of the fleet after the renewal, improvements in vessel efficiency and environmental performance, prevailing industry practice among comparable listed dry-bulk companies, and the increasing economic operating lives of modern dry-bulk vessels.

Source: 1H2026 unaudited condensed interim financial statements, note 2.2, page 10. Recorded here as a fact with its magnitude, because any comparison of FY2026 earnings against FY2025 or earlier is affected by it. A separate observation: the Uni Harmony acquisition announcement of 29 July 2026 describes "the Group's depreciation method for vessels, being 20 years" — seven months after the change took effect.

Corporate-events timeline, FY2024 to date

Dividends declared, per financial year

Source: the issuer's dividend-per-share history page. FY2021 included 2.0 cents and FY2022 5.0 cents of special dividend. The full series back to the 2007 listing, including the 2015 one-for-ten share consolidation and the 2019 bonus issue, is in the workbook. Share count has been static at 78,599,987 since 2019, with no treasury shares, options, convertibles or scrip scheme.

The share price and what came with its moves

Over the window Uni-Asia returned +13.6% on a dividend-adjusted basis; the Straits Times Index returned +80.0%.

Questions put to the company

Neutral questions arising from gaps in the public filings. Each is answerable from disclosure the company already prepares. None implies a view on value.

• Uni-Asia has ordered two newbuilds with roughly US$66m of implied cost, and both announcements state that no definitive financing has been arranged. What are the facility terms, and does the listed parent carry recourse or guarantees on them?
• The group discloses fleet-wide hire days and an average daily rate each half, but not the charter type, rate or expiry of any individual vessel, and only one vessel appraisal is public. Will the fleet table carry a per-vessel charter and valuation ladder?
• The ex-Japan property segment reports about US$1.5m of assets against about US$9.3m of liabilities. How much of that liability is owed outside the group?
• Vessel useful lives were extended from 20 to 25 years with effect from 1 January 2026, worth about US$4.1m a year of pre-tax profit. Were residual values reassessed at the same time, and on what evidence?
• The group publishes voluntary quarterly corporate updates carrying revenue-generating hire days and the average daily charter rate, alongside half-yearly statutory reporting. Is the quarterly update a continuing commitment, and will those two operating metrics remain in it?

Download

A print-ready PDF of this page, for reading away from the screen: Uni-Asia Group evidence library (PDF). It carries the same content as this page — as-filed history, segment economics, fleet, governance and open questions — and the same omissions: no rating, no fair value, no forecast.

How this page was built

Where the primary sources are filed. SGX issuer page for CHJ — announcements, financial statements, annual reports · Uni-Asia Group investor relations. Exchange portals re-file and purge documents over time; the text above cites each document by name and date so it can be found again. Tables on this page as data: JSON · CSV — the page’s own as-filed and recomputed tables, cell for cell, with their section and caption.

From primary documents only: all nineteen annual reports since the 2007 listing, the IPO prospectus, the results announcements for FY2024, 1H2025, FY2025 and 1H2026, the four vessel-acquisition announcements and the Uni Harmony announcement with its independent valuation certificate, its 28 August 2026 EGM minutes and written answers, both newbuild announcements, the Hong Kong property update and FY2024 profit guidance, the CEO succession announcement, the issuer's dividend history, and the Statistics of Shareholdings in the FY2025 annual report. The CHJ listed-parent announcement index — 813 items from 2007 to 2026 — was indexed from the issuer's investor-relations mirror. Uni-Asia Shipping, Uni-Asia Capital (Japan) and the historical Uni-Asia Holdings issuer have separate disclosure routes; this page does not claim whole-group tape completeness.

Every figure was keyed by hand from the filing and then reconciled: the balance sheet balances in each year shown, segment rows sum to group totals in every period, the halves sum to the full years, and every reported balance, segment total and half-year/full-year bridge used on this page was independently re-keyed. Where a figure is computed rather than reported, the computation is stated next to it.

What this page deliberately omits: any rating, fair value, target price, price-to-book comparison, forecast, scenario or view on the share price. Those exist in the private working files and are not published.

Corrections log

• 21 August 2026 — price-driver history added. The page gains a three-year record of what has actually moved the shares, built by detecting the moves before reading any news and then reading every announcement the listed parent published in that window, with each item's SGX broadcast timestamp. That enumeration covers the listed parent's own tape; the separate UAS, UACJ and historical UAHL disclosure streams remain gapped and are not claimed. 12 of 18 detected moves have no announcement behind them. Two figures used earlier in this project were corrected in the same pass: an internal count of unexplained moves said 13 where the register says 12 plus one index move, and an internal question asked whether the group would consider quarterly operating updates when it already publishes them voluntarily. An original illustration of the vessel class was also added, drawn from a written brief rather than from issuer artwork.
• 20 August 2026 — KPI provenance correction. Appendix 7.2 of the 1H2026 statements reports 1,508.87 revenue-generating hire days and an average daily charter rate of US$12,690. An interim revision incorrectly said those historical KPIs were not numerically disclosed. The page now distinguishes the reported historical values from undisclosed utilisation and analyst forward assumptions.
• 17 August 2026 — revision after an independent blind audit. The research behind this page was audited by an independent reviewer working from the primary filings, which returned 32 findings, 8 at severity 1. Six of those bear on this page and are now corrected here: the cumulative ship-owning segment figure was restated from +US$47.1m/−US$1.6m to +US$45.3m/−US$3.3m once the FY2020 segment redefinition is respected; the maritime-asset-management framing now carries management’s own statement that the income is largely non-recurring; the FY2024 write-down is quoted gross at US$31.5m on commercial office and industrial buildings rather than only net; the Uni Harmony US$12.32m payment guarantee is added; the two defeated AGM mandates and the auditor change are added; and the Uni Harmony price is described as sitting in the lower half of its valuation range rather than “near the midpoint”. A statement that the group reports only semi-annually was also wrong — it publishes voluntary quarterly corporate updates.
• 17 August 2026 — first publication. Two definitional points worth flagging, because both are easy to get wrong from the filings alone. (1) Net asset value per share: the issuer's stated US$1.64 at 30 June 2026 is total equity including non-controlling interests divided by shares. NAV attributable to owners is US$1.517. The gap is 7.9% and widening as co-investor minorities grow. (2) Total income is not revenue: the top line aggregates charter income, fees, property sales, investment returns (including unrealised fair-value movements), interest and other income. Revenue from contracts with customers was US$11.0m of the US$25.1m of 1H2026 total income.

Uni-Asia Group Limited is covered here as a factual evidence library. Figures are as filed by the issuer or computed from filings, with the computation shown. This page is not investment advice, not a recommendation, and carries no view on the value of the shares. Information through 28 August 2026.