Corporate Connect Webinar Presentation & Q&A

Okay, good evening everyone. Welcome to today's session corporate connect webinar which is organized by Sias and supported by the SGX group. My name is Siva, I work for Sias and I'm your host for today. Today's session or the main feature will be called USRead, formerly known as Kepel Pacific Oak USRead. Before I carry on, welcome to everyone including our audience from YouTube. Now, Core USRead, formerly known as Kepel Pacific Oak USRead, is a distinctive US focused office read listed on the SGX's main board since 9th of November 2017. Core targets high growth sectors such as technology, advertising, media and information as well as medical and health

care while investing in quality commercial assets across key growth markets in the United States. Its strategy focuses on vibrant super sunbelt and 18-hour cities that offer strong economic fundamentals and attract with lifestyle appeal. As at 31st December 2025, Core's diversified portfolio comprised 13 freehold office buildings and business campuses across eight key growth markets with a total portfolio value of about 1.3 billion US dollars. Core aims to be the preferred US office SRead for investors seeking sustainable distributions and strong total returns. Now before I call upon the senior management of Core to deliver their corporate presentation, we have here with us Mr. James Ui, Chief Market Strategist for Tiger Brokers

who will deliver our usual market highlights. After James' presentation, we will then have the Q&A session, sorry the corporate presentation first by Core and then we will have a Q&A session for members of the public to ask whatever questions they might have. So without much further ado, I call upon James to deliver his market highlights. James, over to you. Thank you Siva. Let me share my stack first. Thank you. So I hope that everyone can see this. Hi, good evening everyone. This is James from Tiger Brokers Singapore. So I'll be sharing some insight on the Singapore market. So there are a lot of news last week but mostly other macro news. So some of the important ones that we could see include

Singapore manufacturing output search by 16.6%, mainly driven by the AI related demand. And we have been seeing a spike in the oil price due to Iran war. If there is continuous spike in the oil prices, then we may see higher inflation and hence delay in the further reserve rate cut as well. But again, higher oil price means higher inflation, but it also means slow down in the global growth. Then we may start seeing a fund outflowing from the emerging market and flow back into the US market and hence pushing up the US dollar. And according to the economists at Morgan Stanley, every $10 increase in the oil prices will hit Asia GDP growth directly by 20 to 30 basis points.

So please keep a look out in the oil prices as well. We could see the SDI index return about 6% so far this year. Some of the outperformance this year include Yang Zhejiang, UOL, SD engineering. And some of the worst performance include Genting Singapore, SATS, Asanda series. Again, it's a good time to be a Singapore investor. While it feels like a bear market in the US, the sentiment in the Singapore equity market is completely different. The SDI market is one of the top performing stock indices globally so far this year. The year-to-day return this year is roughly about 6%. And the five year annualized return is 15.6%, outperforming Hansings, 1.36%, outperforming S&P 500s, 13.82%.

The month-to-date return is about negative 1%. But the seasonality suggests to us that much could still be a good month. Over the past 25 years, March generally provides a positive return of 0.85%, whereas April returns 1.86%. So if we were to take a page from history, SDI index could go higher and only suffer meaningful corrections in May.

I want to talk briefly on the interest rate. The US futures market is now suggesting that we may see two rate cuts in 2026. There would be in the month of July and December FOMC meeting itself. Just bear in mind that John Powell's tenure as the Chair of Federal Reserve will end in May this year. So I guess he may not do anything about the interest rate until he steps down. He just wants to leave the interest rate problem to the next chair. And there could be another rate cut in December 2027, meaning we shall see low interest rates, conducive interest rate environment until end 2027.

So we just want to keep things simple here. As long as interest rates remain low, there could be constructive for the stock market. Not just REITs, all sectors should benefit, but maybe especially REITs itself. So the million dollar question here is how much lower Singapore's SORA could go. We can see that SORA has come down a lot. The three month composter SORA has fallen from 3% in the beginning of 2025 to about 1.12% at the moment. So it's about 63% drop. Meanwhile, Federal Reserve doesn't really cut so much, but we have a fund run the Federal Reserve rate cut. And here are some of the recent developments in the Singapore market. I want to go through one by one.

The key thing to look out here is we could see that there is more EQDP injections. The EQDP size has expanded to about 6.5 billion.

And so far 3.95 billion has been allocated to nine fund managers. So there is another 2.55 billion to be allocated. The next batch of fund managers benefiting from this EQDP are expected to be appointed around mid-2026. But we do not know how much will be allocated in the next round of allocation. And I just want to remind everyone that not all will go into small mid-cap stocks. For example, one of the beneficiaries from this EQDP is Fullerton Singapore Value Up Fund, which it indicated in their mandate that it only targeted to allocate about 30% of the NAB to the small mid-cap Singapore equities,