Daily Briefing: No profit in Hong Kong instability, says Singapore Minister; Digital marketing agency Hashmeta buys ShopperBoard

And landed homes are great for wealth preservation due to limited stock.

From Bloomberg:

Singapore’s Minister of Law and Home Affairs doesn’t believe the island city-state stands to benefit from any instability in Hong Kong, as protests stretch into a third month.

Since the protests started in June, sparked by a proposal to ease extraditions to the mainland, the idea has been mooted that business leaders wary of increased Chinese meddling in Hong Kong could move their money and operations to Singapore.

“There’s no profit in seeing instability,” K. Shanmugam said in an interview, according to a transcript published on the Ministry of Law’s website.

However, Shanmugam said it would take a lot more than the current protests to make serious investors leave Hong Kong. “Unless people become pessimistic about China, I don’t see immediate calculations being made by serious investors,” he said. “People with easy ability to transfer money, may do different things. But I think other serious investors understand Hong Kong’s position.”

Read more here.

From DealStreetAsia:

Singapore’s digital marketing agency Hashmeta has acquired fashion marketplace ShopperBoard Pte Ltd. (ShopperBoard) for an undisclosed sum, according to an announcement.

Founded in 2013, ShopperBoard claims that its app hosts more than 70 local brands in Singapore, including Love Bonito, Ohvola, Neonmello and targets young and savvy shoppers, particularly women, aged between 18 and 44 in Singapore who are regular online shoppers.

Hashmeta plans to operate the ShopperBoard platform by investing in R&D, and looks to integrate the influencer-generated content into ShopperBoard through its influencer network platform StarNgage.

Enhanced influencer content and shop by influencer workflow will be amongst the top software development priorities for the combined engineering team.

Read more here.

From iCompareLoan:

Landed homes are an excellent asset for wealth preservation due to rare value depreciation and limited availability, according to Sotheby's International Realty.

The report noted that landed homes provide more value on a psf basis in comparison to non-landed homes due to their minimum price of $2m and the 999-year leasehold for landed home of at least 1,500 sqft, which most Singaporeans can ill-afford.

Sotheby's added that since there will no longer be any new freehold/999-year leasehold land distributed by the government, the value of existing stock of landed properties will rise.

“On top of that, landed homes with freehold/999-year leasehold tenure rarely depreciates in value when held for the long term and thus serves as an excellent asset for wealth preservation," Sotheby's added.

Read more here.

Photo from icompareloan